Thursday, March 10, 2011

15 MEGABYTE HARD DISK DRIVE - $2,495.00: Eighty-five vintage computer print ads.

15 comments:

  1. KCosmo9:08 AM

    I definitely owned some of those computers.

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  2. Joseph J. Finn9:11 AM

    Two thoughts:

    1.  I wish the ads were dated; I can make educated guesses on the ones from about 1980 on but I'd be curious about the pre-Apple & Microsoft days.

    2.  Holy inappropriate sexy advertising, Batman!

    3.  Man, those older Apple ads make me appreciate the work that Chiat\Day has done for them in the last decade+ all the more.

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  3. gtv20009:20 AM

    Definitely owned and/or used more of those (including the teletype, and acoustic modem) than I care to remember.  I vividly remember paying $400 for 16 MB of memory for my first PC.

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  4. Adam C.9:53 AM

    JJF - re: Item 2, are you talking about ad #9?

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  5. Marsha10:29 AM

    I owned a few of those too. And $0.02 a byte sounds pretty darned expensive now. (By the way, what idiot photographed the model in the last ad holding the floppy that way? Great way to destroy all your data....)

    I remember the Packard Bell ad well - it was part of discovery when I worked on Comapq v. Packard Bell way back when. Ah, the mid-90s, when a junior associate who knew what the internet was and how to use it could become very important on a litigation team...

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  6. Joseph J. Finn10:34 AM

    Hah!  I showed that one to Christina this morning and was actually sympathizing with Gates there.  He looks horribly uncomfortable.

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  7. Adam C.10:59 AM

    Well, yeah - I bet that desk was murder.

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  8. Paul Tabachneck12:15 PM

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanches/157772030/

    I used to have a copy of this book, that I took around to the bosses at Comcast when we started the Pittsburgh call center for their internet service in '03, recommending that we incorporate it into our knowledgebase. 

    I can't believe they didn't fire me.

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  9. Am I the only one here who subscribed to Compute! Magazine?  (I doubt it.)

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  10. Re: #18. My mother worked for Burroughs for a good chunk of the 70s, and the group she worked in looked much like that picture, from what she said. Truth in advertising!

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  11. Dom DeLuise?

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  12. spacewoman3:52 PM

    Ha -- when I was a summer associate, a senior partner asked me to find him all the cases from the past year on Noerr-Pennington.  As would anyone else in 1998 who had a Westlaw password, I came back an hour later with a complete set.  The man really and truly believed that I was a computer genius.

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  13. Paul Tabachneck4:20 PM

    I used to love copying the code in the back!

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  14. The temptation to put some Devo on over the headphones and fade into a longing nostalgic daze staring at the Commodore 64 adverts is probably more than I should share with the internet at large.  If only they had included an Amiga ad...

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