21 ms·

Vintage computer ads

222 points by davesailer 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago
black_13 4y ago
transfire 4y ago
Magellan sounds better than what we have available now.
- cowmix 4y ago
  It was. At the time (31 years ago) I was the magician in my office because I was, somehow, able to find any file on our Novell file server via a content search-- no matter what program originated it.
causality0 4y ago
By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer. Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990. People overestimate the speed of the spread of computers. I didn't have a computer where I worked until 1994. And then, it was shared by eight people. At my next job in 1995, I made them buy a computer for the office as a term of employment. At the time, I suggested that a laptop might be a good option, since the computer would be shared by three people. For the next two years, the sales guys made fun of me for wanting to put a computer, and for wanting one that fits on my lap. I later heard that when I left, they sold the computer. I wonder how those blissfully computer-free sales guys are doing today. When I worked for Westinghouse in 1996 was the first time I was in an office that has one computer per person. But not every department had computers at all. And most who did were just terminals hooked up to a Vax in accounting. When I worked for a large regional media company in 1997, everyone had a computer. Only a couple of them had internet access, and that was only e-mail. This was during the days when so many people were getting AOL at home that it became uselessly bogged down by its own popularity. 1999: Everyone in the office had their own computer. Not everyone used them. But at least they all had internet access. (OT: I'm sad that the macOS spell checker didn't know the word "Vax" just now)
  - ddulaney 4y ago
    I know this isn’t relevant to the point about usage in 1990, but it shocks me (as somebody born in 1995) that over the course of 4 years you went from being ridiculed over demanding a computer to a computer on everyone’s desk. 4 years!
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      Heres something for you to consider. I remember in the late 80s most people could not type. Typing was done by secretaries and was a specialized skill. There were (optional) for-credit classes in high school dedicated to teaching typing and nothing else. I got a bunch of part-time temp office jobs as a teenager because I could type fast, having grown up with computers, while my friends would get jobs at supermarkets or convenience stores, etc. The temp agencies had me do typing tests (on typewriters, not computers) before placing me. I blew them away at some ungodly WPM speed that I no longer remember. Not atypical by todays standards, I’m sure, but standards were different then. Often I would be the only person in a small office who could type. I certainly was the only male who could type. Everyone else was female. Imagine that today!
      - pcrh 4y ago
        Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US west coast at a research institute that the prof. would have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-write responses that the admin assistant would type into the computer :-D
        ghaff 4y ago
        I worked for a large computer systems company starting in the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based email all along--we made the computers and the software. But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
      - watersb 4y ago
        I took a similar typing test on a typewriter and managed to get in 65 words per minute for the required text, due to my time with computers. But I barely passed, because there was no error correction allowed. No backspace key. Although business typewriters of the time often had the ability to let you correct at least one character, either by buffering a few keystrokes or with actual "white out" over-printing, it was just as common to find yourself working for someone with a cheap typewriter and a bottle of white paint. That was 1988. Summer job temp placement office at hometown university. I attended college far away, a place noted for its computer science department, where there were $20,000 workstations on campus for the department's students. I don't know how many students had their own machines in the dorm, but the ratio on our floor was 1/12.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  We (in Germany) didn’t have one until I was 12 in 1998, before that I’d visit my dad at work sometimes to play Prince of Persia on his office computer. I guess technically we had a Sinclair ZX81 in the cellar, but I wouldn’t find out about that till much later ;)
  - ant6n 4y ago
    We (in Germany), by 1998, had 3 computers at home: a 400 mhz celeron connected to the internet, a hand me down 486 for my brother, and a hand me down 386 for me. All me friends were starting to get access to pentiums with tnts, by 2000 everybody was playing UT and counterstike.
- VLM 4y ago
  I suspect some statistical weirdness going on in the precise formulation of the survey question. I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely. Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although schools were owned by Apple II in those days... My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something like that.
  - Transfinity 4y ago
    Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limited use outside of a few specific domains.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Call-out: we're also talking about mostly un-networked computers here. 1989 is the very beginning of "the Internet might be useful for general purposes by non-scientists." And incidentally, the same year BGP was dreamed up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_provider) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_... So most computers were running boxed retail software with extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at all).
      - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
        Computers were networking years before the rise of the Internet. BBSes were a thing in the 80s.
        ethbr0 4y ago
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I remember being excited for my dad to get a computer around 1994 or 1995, and it was a Mac IIci. A bunch of people I know got computers around then or within the next couple years, but before that it wasn't much of a thing. One of my earliest computer memories was using ClarisWorks Paint and spending (what seemed like) hours drawing a scarecrow while my parents watched, and then the computer crashed and it was all lost. My mom had a word processor around then as well (can't remember which came first), a single purpose device for writing with a keyboard, a CRT monitor, and a printer. Looked somewhat like this[0] but I can't remember whether it was the same brand or not. 0. https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg
  - sircastor 4y ago
    I remember painting abstract primate pictures with MacPaint when I was quite young. I was sad when we got the new computer because I think MacPaint didn’t make the transition to system 7 or something, and my dad told me we couldn’t open the files. We also had a IIci. It came out I’m 89, and I was shocked to learn how insanely expensive it was at launch - $6000… $14k adjusted for inflation.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      That was the era of really expensive computers, but each upgrade really seemed to do something phenomenally new - color or resolution or printer or 3D etc. Nowadays it’s hard to really notice the upgrades without running benchmarks.
- sircastor 4y ago
  We had a computer at home when I was a kid and in retrospect I was surprised to realize how unusual that was. I imagine it gave me far more advantage than I think.
- bane 4y ago
  Sometime in the mid-90s the local Microcenter had a deal on a $999 PC. IIR it was running Windows-95, but was otherwise a bare-minimum system. The "deal" was that the PC also had an ad infested border around the screen that ate up some non-trivial amount of the screen space. The line to buy it would through nearly every aisle in the store, out the front door and down the block, for over a week. People were asking for forwards on their paychecks, taking out loans, selling cars, anything they could do to get a computer at this magic price point. The main selling point? It had a modem and people could see what this "internet" business was all about for the first time.
- flomo 4y ago
  In 1990, it would have been somewhat rare for a college student to own a computer, but there were computer labs everywhere on campus and you had an email address, so it was clear they a part of modern life. They were priced in the 'used car' range so it wasn't impossible to own one. (edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
  - luma 4y ago
    In my freshman year in 1993, I was the only person on my floor to haul a PC into the dorms. Across 4 buildings each with a dozen floors, there was maybe ten people who had computers in their room. The only reason I had one was because dad was an IBMer and he managed to obtain an XT 286 for me.
    - Cockbrand 4y ago
      TIL there was an XT 286. I always thought that the 286 was exclusive to the AT.
    - NateLawson 4y ago
      Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16 with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most used DOS/Windows but the CS students dual booted to Linux (Slackware mostly, some SLS).
      - UncleSlacky 4y ago
        I remember being jealous of those doing Cybernetics at Reading (UK) as one of the big manufacturers donated a PC to every student on the course.
    - flomo 4y ago
      Similar, I had a Mac SE and was maybe the only person in my dorm section to have a new personal computer. But I also knew someone who had bought a Yugo, which was more expensive.
- tacens 4y ago
  my dad was taking a CS course starting in 1989 and they still had to send written programs by post mail to Warsaw because it would compile faster and "more accurately". from what he described the professors would do a "code review" but you only passed if it compiled there.
reactjavascript 4y ago
The technology has progressed. But have humans progressed?
- tomcam 4y ago
  Hell yes! Back then here in the USA we had only 2 sexes, 3 TV networks, and all libraries had were these printed website things they called “books”. Nowadays we have 57 sexes, 570 TV networks, and libraries in the city have evolved to their true purpose of sheltering the unhoused. And soon we won’t be burdened by our privacy belongings! https://twitter.com/wef/status/800965291215818752?s=21 https://twitter.com/wef/status/800965291215818752?s=21 I mean, who wouldn’t see this as leveling up?
- agumonkey 4y ago
  all i see is diminishing returns, marketing and fantasies. 4MB used to make people believe they'd do everything for life, accounting, programming, graphics whatever. It was infinite joy with only 320x200 points. Now you sell a 4k capable pocket datacenter running on 5W and people are barely satisfied for a year.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Imagine never having sweets in your life, then the first time you having a peppermint your life would be changed. Now imagine a long life where you had all the sweets you could ever eat available all the time. Your attitude to them is going to be far different. In addition, back in the 90s computers were going to attract 'computer people' and the rest would ignore them. Now they are just a fact of life, even for the disinterested.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    TBF the pocket datacenter does way more than a vintage does though. However I do agree there is an inflation of customer expectation since the 90s. Just imagine: assuming tech evolves a lot slower. What would happen? People would still be OK, games would still be fun, business would carry on regardless.
ezconnect 4y ago
That was my little boy dream, to play the Bird vs Magic basketball video game. I had an Atari 2600 back then and was buying used computer magazine and when that was released it looked amazing compared to the stick figure basketball on the 2600
- antiterra 4y ago
  It was Dr. J vs Bird, and it felt slow and clunky at the time, but yes, miles better than anything on the Atari 2600. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bi...
codevark 4y ago
alangibson 4y ago
Everytime I see prices of hard drives back in the day, I get a feeling that's a mixture of claustrophobia, despair and shock.
- 300bps 4y ago
  It’s all relative. My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-251 40 MB MFM hard drive on my 10 MHz Intel 8088 CPU. It cost about $300 at the time and perpetually remained about 80% full. The last hard drive I bought was a Seagate Exos X18 18 TB Sata hard drive on my 3.6 GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. It cost about $300 and has perpetually remained about 80% full.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    so true :D
  - PopAlongKid 4y ago
    My first hard drive was a PCs Limited (now known as Dell) "drive on a card" which was a competitor to the higher-priced 20MB HardCard (brand name as I recall). I'd have to go to another computer to try looking up the purchase price. There were hard drives mounted directly on an interface card, they would take up two slots, when five available slots max was pretty much standard.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  I remember buying an external 5GB hard drive for $4,999 with the first ProTools system back in 1991 (which itself cost much more than that). I was more amazed at having that much capacity than I am now buying yet another 4TB drive from Walmart for less than $100.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Don't forget to adjust for inflation. A $4.5k disk drive in 1990 would cost around $9k today. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Pixel art actually displayed nicer on CRT monitors, and DOS interfaces were pretty fast and keyboard optimized, and there wasn't an industry dedicated to spying on you. So not always for the better.
hasbot 4y ago
I got into computers in high school around 1980. I used to read Byte magazine and studied every ad. So exciting! My senior year, after saving and saving my income from my $2.85/hour after school job I bought an Apple ][+ for around $2000.
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  The craziest thing about Byte Magazine was that it was published in Peterborough, NH. I was friends with the editor's son in the early 90s... If you've ever been to that area of NH, you'd be amazed that a high tech magazine of Byte's stature was published there. I'd be surprised if the town even had decent broadband before the 2000s. Physically and culturally, it's about as far away from Silicon Valley (where I live now) as you can get.
CPLX 4y ago
It’s definitely different. Progress is a value judgement.
t0mmyb0y 4y ago
jmclnx 4y ago
I miss the days when everything was simple ASCII Text :)
- hansel_der 4y ago
  thou beeing german, i still use the us-layout and avoid umlauts when dealing with computers. some deep habits
sumthinprofound 4y ago
I recall alot of advertisements in computer magazines from the late 80s featuring bikini girls and sexual innuendo.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  that's still a thing
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Where? I don’t see it in the US at all.
Jeema101 4y ago
I miss those days. I feel like back then computers naturally encouraged exploration and learning. There was no internet, or even modems in most cases, so there was no alternative but exploration - trying to figure out what all you could do with this strange piece of hardware. I'm not entirely sure I'm just jaded by time - I feel like maybe computers became commodity appliances, for an entirely different crowd, but I stayed the same.
- sircastor 4y ago
  I grew up with a Mac so my experience was a little different, but I’m amazed at people who’s first experience sitting down at a computer was starting at an unforgiving blinking cursor.
- thunderbong 4y ago
  The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. - Oscar Wilde.
VLM 4y ago
The article focuses almost entirely on hardware especially hardware prices. Then there's the usual confusion about inflation. In a theoretical sense a $3K hard drive would be like spending $9K now, but with massive economic decline and income inequality the real comparison is in the 80s families could scare up $3K if they really wanted, but now people can only afford $1K phones with exotic high interest rate financing, so people were either three times richer back then or nine times richer back then. Either way times are not good now. The point of an ad for a $3K hard drive from the 80s is not that it would in some theoretical sense cost $9K now or would store a million times as much data now, but that short decades ago people could afford to spend $3K and now they're stressed at spending merely $300. Another few decades of permanent economic decline and we as a people will be stressed at spending only $30. Most of the consumer-level ads try to link their product with success and intelligence, whereas all advertisements now focus on competitively showing off your former wealth or some variation on "We are woke so our products must be good" LOL. Tech ads in 2022 look a lot more like mechanical gold watch ads in the 70s or designer jeans ads from the 80s. The other point missed in the article is computer mags from my youth were absolutely chock full of software advertisements for $1000 compilers and $500 word processor and spreadsheet software. When I was a little kid a nice C compiler cost about half my dad's car, then as a teen you could get a decent K+R compatible compiler for a hundred bucks from radio shack (I paid 50 on sale using money I saved) and as a young adult, development tools are all free and you download linux and emacs and start writing code for the cost of some bbs download time, and later internet download time. Most of the software that we take for granted as being free today in 2022 used to sell for at least hundreds of dollars in the 80s and at least $50 in the early 90s, then the internet hit and you just download gcc "for free".
- pixl97 4y ago
  Eh, your economics have some issues here. Back then people were extremely stressed about spending that much. At least where I lived people could not spend that much, and a lot of computers that were bought were with financing. On of the big things that has changed is the massive increase in housing costs and rents causing all kinds of economic issues.
- beezle 4y ago
jkmcf 4y ago
Bird vs Johnson/Jordan, possibly what is in that picture, is one of my all time favorite games.
- jdkee 4y ago
  Also one of my favorite Atari 800 games, Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. See https://www.giantbomb.com/dr-j-and-larry-bird-go-one-on-one/3030-13770/ https://www.giantbomb.com/dr-j-and-larry-bird-go-one-on-one/...
  - jkmcf 4y ago
    OMG How did I forget this one! It wasn't Magic, it was Dr J (and I'm from Philly...)
marcodiego 4y ago
These ads show not only how much we progressed in terms of technology but also as being a society with less prejudice and misogyny. Take a look at the role of women on those photos. Disgusting!
- ajross 4y ago
  That's what I find striking too. Likewise there's precisely one photo in the entire collection showing a non-white face (and it's a school room of kids, not "customers"). I remember reading these ads; it wasn't that long ago at all.
  - felix318 4y ago
    Conversely people looking at current adverts 50 years from now will wonder “where did all the white people go?” (I’m not white and I don’t care, it’s just an observation)
    - egypturnash 4y ago
      I dunno, they’re still there, they’re just not the only people?
      - teakettle42 4y ago
        I visited an indoor mall recently, in an area with some of the whitest demographics in the nation, but also (since I know the stereotypes about fat Americans) the healthiest. Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color. Even for athletic wear. Whatever weird fetishism the marketing world has going on now, it’s absolutely not representative relative to local demographics, nor nation-wide demographics.
        ajross 4y ago
        > Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color. Obviously I can't speak to whatever local ads you saw, but I don't believe the "almost without exception" for an instant. Here's the front page of Forever 21, sort of a reasonable approximation to an "indoor mall" environment: https://www.forever21.com/ https://www.forever21.com/ Out of 55 models with faces that I see, 27 are white (or at least plausibly white-presenting, obviously there's some ambiguity here as there always is with any kind of ethnic definition). So... 50% almost exactly. A bit lower than the population at large (though probably much closer to the younger/urban target market). Hardly a lack of representation, which is what you claim to be seeing. But my guess is that absent these numbers, you'd look at that page and think "almost without exception..." right?
swayvil 4y ago
Our numbers certainly have increased. And everybody likes that.
alkaloid 4y ago
I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983. We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted. Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.
- synu 4y ago
  Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on it and basically never stopped coding since then. It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.
  - alkaloid 4y ago
    > It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer. Isn't this the honest truth.
- btgeekboy 4y ago
  We weren’t well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for lack of space - and the rest is history.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    For sooooo long the upgrade cycle was so short that you could live quite cheaply and comfortably by inserting yourself in the right place in the chain. In college I’d upgrade every three to six months and sell the old system off to someone for a good percentage of the new hotness.
- haolez 4y ago
  Same here. Got my 386 in 1994 (in Brazil nonetheless!).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
A really good place to see old computer ads in context is on magazine archives. Archive.org has the BYTE archives. https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE It is fun to go back and browse them.
usrn 4y ago
I honestly think nothing has really changed. You can see SCO saying "We have graphics now! People will want to use Unix on the desktop now" all the way back in the 80s. Computers keep getting bigger but the software keeps up with it. All that's really changed is that we have more computers since the smallest ones are so cheap, even so we had cheap MCUs back then.
pbw 4y ago
A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out? ‪If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress. ‬
- masswerk 4y ago
  Now you could argue that there’s less space on a modern drive, given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with mostly text files. I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac, which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100 with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon, HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before. Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file, you may need an entire drive for dependencies… To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space. As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you’re selling billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost.
  - pbw 4y ago
    You are right the more space we have the more we dream up ways to use it. However I wouldn't go as far to say "drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them". People still store text but it's now basically free. Images and audio are heading towards free. Videos still add up. You specifically call out executable programs which I agree have grown in size very rapidly. So I think it depends on what you are putting on the drive. I wouldn't say all space gains have been eaten up by bigger files.
ivraatiems 4y ago
Something that I often find frustrating about modern technology is how little we do with the vast amounts of processing power we have. A lot of what we are doing now - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing - was done by machines with a fraction of the computing power two decades ago. What does it matter if the numbers get bigger if the use cases are the same?
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Modern software benefits from increased computational power because it allows new features and speeding up older ones. Sure, “office” apps don’t benefit much, but you’re ignoring many fields where they do benefit. For example, the field of 3D graphics. Games and animated movies have become a lot more realistic and feature filled thanks to more powerful graphics cards. In fact, Disney specifically puts a lot of effort into making hair realistic. That was impractical a decade ago, and impossible a decade prior.
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    You're absolutely right about 3D graphics, but how much time does the average desktop computer user spend rendering hair? Even if you need bigtime compute power for video games, there are game streaming services where someone else's computer will do that for you. I have a high-end graphics card and all the processing power I need to play games... but I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I?
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      > I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I? How is this different from owning anything? I have a bike, but I’m not riding it literally all the time. But I still don’t think owning it is a waste.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    Meh. Are the stories being created with games getting better? For example, Half Life and Portal are pretty modern and immersive and run on some 20-year-old hardware.
dwighttk 4y ago
Man for me it was realizing my phone has ~ 200x the flops of the Cray XMP from Jurassic Park.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Thank you for sharing this.
maestroia 4y ago
"By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer." As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no practical reason for them.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  There are several anachronistic mistakes in this article. I think the author is perhaps too young to have lived in those times.
russellbeattie 4y ago
Who still has their first computer? My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 is sitting quietly in my garage, in a box that contains it, the TV adapter, the Color Basic manuals, a Radio Shack joystick and a half dozen cassette tapes with programs I wrote as an 10yo in 1982. If anyone at the Computer History Museum reads this: Get the 70s/80s micro computers out from behind the display cases!!! CHM has at least one of every computer you can think of, why not take the extras and put them on the floor for visitors to play with? It's like torture wandering through the displays and not being able to play with all those computers and video games you lusted over as a kid.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  I'm a bit younger than a TRS-80, but yes, I do. It's at my parent's house. A 1989 Compaq Deskpro running OS/2. AFAIK, it still runs.
- indymike 4y ago
  I have a couple TI-994a's and a C64 out in the garage that were given to me as gifts... not the original (that died a long time ago). I learned to program on the TI, TI-BASIC first, then Extended Basic, then some Assembler. The C64 was great because you had to understand how to work directly with hardware. On the TI, you would nice library call like CALL SOUND. On the C64 you'd have to POKE everything to the correct address to coax sound out of it (often what you would do in a single line on the TI would take 4-5 lines on the C64, but the C64 was fast, and had lots of memory). Good times.
- samatman 4y ago
  I still have my first keyboard, an IBM Model F. The PC-AT which went with it was Ship of Theseuse'd into the late 486 era, I abandoned it when tower cases became standard.
- lakkal 4y ago
  My Atari 800 died in a lightning storm in 1983, but I still have the replacement 800XL downstairs, with floppy drives, cassette drive, thermal printer, and 300 baud modem. An Ape Face paralell port adapeer for the Epson RX-80, which I don't have anymore. Lots of floppies and cartridges, too. And JForth along with the manual.
johnohara 4y ago
The oldest and most mind-boggling process ever devised and foisted upon readers lies at the bottom of many of those ads -- "circle ### on reader service card." It was a cruel joke for the ad to spark your interest whereby you would circle the number, mail in the bingo card to the publisher (3-5 days), whose lead management group would process it (3-5 days), then send the lead to the company or dealer (3-5 days), who would assign it to a sales rep (3-5 days), who was working their leads and getting back to potential customers (3-5 days), who would then ignore the call because they had lost interest in the product or couldn't remember requesting information. Compare that with today where making a phone call to the sales team takes too long (3-5 minutes) and it's easier to just go get the damn information yourself.
moron4hire 4y ago
I first started working in web development in 2005. We had Pentium 4 servers, running at what would probably feel like 1ghz today (P4 had some pipeline problems), with probably a gig or 2 of RAM, on-prem. Core count? No idea. I'm guessing 4 at the most, but it might have only been 2. We usually ran two servers, one for app server and one for databases, though there were frequently multiple apps and multiple databases on those servers. Such a machine probably cost around $3k at the time, (IDK, I'm just guessing. Also, inflation has been about 50% since then). Most of that cost was probably in disk arrays. I was working on GIS apps, so we had "a lot" of data at rest. We had dedicated DBAs and sys admins. Most of the difficulty in getting applications built was A) being young and not knowing what I was doing, B) communicating and getting approved configuration changes with the sys admins for whatever stupid thing we were being asked to do by bizdev, C) communicating and getting approved scheme changes in the database with the DBAs without having a local copy we could modify at will to test anything before going to staging. Today, I have my servers in the cloud. I'm given 2 cores at 1ghz with like 4gb of RAM. It's about $2k a year. Every year. Or in that ballpark. It's not a huge diff from 17 years ago. My laptop has 14 cores running at atleast 3.5ghz, with 64gb of RAM. Plus a massive GPU. It also cost about $2k. I work in VR so I spend that every two years. The server backends I build now are not significantly different than I ever did. The front ends are significantly more complex (I thought I was pretty hot shit making a 2D graphics API in JS out of absolutely positioned DIVs as "pixels" back then, before Canvas was a thing, and now I do full motion 3D in VR at 120hz). So IDK. I probably got some minor details wrong, I'm not going to look absolutely everything up. Take it for a rough approximation. One thing that strikes me is that, operationally, things are vastly different, but not necessarily easier. I don't have to get anyone to approve anything anymore, but that's mostly because I'm the one in charge now and I know what I'm doing now. Front end tooling has improved thanks to TypeScript, but that's also come with massive amounts of other complications because it still needs to be JS at the end of the day. NPM has made it easier to get and manage dependencies, but the creaking tower of transpilers and bundling tools has clawed a lot of those gains back. I used to be able to clone a repo, start visual studio, hit F5, and after about 45s for a full, first time rebuild, I'd be in the app. Now I need to restore dependencies, make sure all the build tools are at the right versions, make sure all the separate build tools are running in the right order and time. Sometimes it doesn't work, because it's not clear why TypeScript is using VS' outdated lib.d.ts files that install by default instead of the ones that are in my node_modules. It "works", but it's deeply dissatisfying. I can never tell if introducing a new project into the repo is going to break first-time setup. I'm able to do more on the project I have already setup, but seeing up new projects has gotten so difficult that I often find myself so mentally overwhelmed (disgust, avoidance, etc) that I just don't, I go back to working on the one project instead of trying something new. Don't know where I'm going with this, but there it be.
MarcoZavala 4y ago
fuzzfactor 4y ago
Victor Borge in his later years here in the Verbatim ad, was a European keyboard virtuoso who made his way in the US by adding a distinctive comedy element to his solo touring performances. So it's only approprate to have him as a spokesman sitting at a computer keyboard, with his document looking not much different than sheet music. And he looks like he is tickling the ivories there, sticking mainly to the black keys I see. Maybe a bit like Irving Berlin, who was the most popular songwriter for so many decades, and who only played on the black keys. Interestingly, Berlin's personal Steinway is now in the Smithsonian since it is a one-of-a-kind chromatic piano where he could mechanically shift the musical key the black keys were tuned for. So he could get together with artists like Sinatra and play his tunes as originally written but in the singers' preferred key. Now Borge was actually quite improvisational for a clasical musician. He could get up there, introduce himself and play a number of 30 to 60 second interludes, and get away with saying or merely acting like he hadn't made his mind up what full piece to play. Then there could be a little monologue for a while which was one good reason so many were there to see him, but regardless of how excellent that was, the elephant in the room since the beginning had always been the significant percentage of the crowd who wanted nothing but the music. Zappa had this too. Borge would flip up his coat-tails, move closer to the microphone and say in his European accent "Do you want to hear Great Music? Classics?" He then quickly extends his arms in the characteristic way for more freedom of movement, puts his hands on the keys, moves closer to the microphone again and says "Too bad!"
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> the Apple Laser Printer quickly became the preferred printer of choice for computer owners of all brands. In 1984? No, it did not. Most everyone was using dot matrix printers in 1984.
- tlb 4y ago
  It's the one everyone preferred, but not many could afford.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  For business printing the standard was the daisy wheel - which was insanely loud and sounded like a machine gun. Between 2X and 6X as expensive as a dot matrix. So around $2k for a mid-price model and $4k for a faster and more reliable model at the high end. Dot matrix printers were relatively affordable. But still expensive. Maybe $300 for a budget model, up to a few k for a high end model with a 132 chars and a double density print head. Adjusted prices are roughly 2.7X. So almost $800 for a basic dot matrix, up to a ballpark $10k for a high end printer. Just for printing. Compare with today where a mono laser costs ~$150 for a basic model, $300-$600 for added scanning and copying, and $400-$800 for a colour laser with extra features.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Thanks for this. I was fortunate to have an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer in 1983. My father bought it for me. I had no idea they were so expensive - at least $1500 in todays dollars (I could only find the price of the MX-80 in 1983, not the FX-80 which was even more expensive). I wish my father was alive for me to thank him yet again for this marvelous gift that must have put him out quite a bit.
gumby 4y ago
I remember many of those ads from when they appeared! I like that the author showed a lot of ads with girls operating the computer. Typically it was boys (or whatever) with his sister just passively standing by. Of course it was the 80s and apparently it was quite common for the “family computer” to be installed in the son’s room. TBH my favorite part was being reminded of the absurd clothing people wore in those days and the incredible clutter of stuff people had everywhere.
mlom 4y ago
this doesn't show we've progressed at all, it just shows we're still distracted by colors and lights
nixnax 4y ago
gernb 4y ago
I always feel amazed when I see a large micro-SD card (1TB for example) and compare it to my Atari 800 which had three 16k ram cartridges, each larger than an iPhone Max. So this micro-SD card the size of my thumbnail is 67 million times the memory of one of those cartridges. http://www.vintagecomputer.net/atari/800/atari_800_48kRAM-10KROM.JPG http://www.vintagecomputer.net/atari/800/atari_800_48kRAM-10...
- IMSAI8080 4y ago
  And one SD card could probably hold every commercially released title for every machine ever released combined up until about the CD era started in the 90s.
rmason 4y ago
Those ads really take me back. I had a college friend tell me in 1974 that everyone would have a computer on their desk by 1984. We ruthlessly mocked him for it. But in 1983 I got a computer on my desk at the fertilizer plant. There was zero software for the fertilizer industry at the time. So I started with Lotus 123 and taught myself the macro language and set out to create it. Then I convinced my boss to buy me a copy of dBase II and set out to learn that as well. I was spending every work night until 11 pm. Got tired of that so I withdrew $3500 out of my meager savings and bought an IBM XT clone from a new company in Flint. I remember adding a modem so that I could explore CompuServe, a large mainframe based online service by H & R Block.
robrorcroptrer 4y ago
Seems to me there's not been much progress.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  On the contrary. I think surveillance has progressed considerably and our transition into a full blown global dystopia is on track
johnklos 4y ago
Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-centric? All the world isn't a modern computer and/or running Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet. Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank the Google Flavor Aid?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  WebP is a standard. And serving different files to different user agents makes the problem you're describing worse, not better.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnklos 4y ago
    It's a standard, but it isn't a universal standard. Know the difference. Until a standard has both been accepted by a significant majority, and there has been plenty of time for the standard to be adopted, it's bad to simply turn on a feature and say, "screw you" to everyone who has an older device or computer that can't run the latest software. Serving different files to different user agents is not desirable, sure, but it's better than this crap - have the latest or it doesn't work. You know this, I think. So is it that people are shitty and elitist, or is that people are just ignorant? If the former, then we can't change that - people will be shitty if they choose to be shitty. Sounds like you advocate for that. If people are just ignorant about the fact that their web site doesn't work on older phones, tablets, Macs, or older non-Chrome browsers, then they should be told.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      It isn't just the Chromium monoculture that supports WebP, though. Firefox and Safari both do too. What other browsers do you want to support it before you'll consider it universal? And for people with operating systems too old to run any browser version that supports WebP, they're also way behind on security updates, so we should be encouraging them to upgrade to a newer OS.
drewcoo 4y ago
Moore's Law porn. As to how far we have progressed, I'd rather see us talk about how we interact with technology and how it changes our lives. Smart phones are powerful computers. They are ubiquitous. They're the computers we all have now. What have they accomplished? I can always contact someone, though loneliness seems to have increased. People can also contact me all the time, sometimes with video. Nobody wears watches because they carry phones, so we missed the Dick Tracy future. Nobody can be lost anymore because they (and many other entities) always know where on earth they are. All of those things are absent from the old ads. Our "progress" is mostly about surveillance whereas the old ads were all about what individuals could accomplish. And there's definitely progress in how things are marketed to us. Aren't those old ads clunky?
ozzythecat 4y ago
This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn’t afford it, and I’m not sure what drove him to make the purchase. I do know he used a credit card, couldn’t make the payments, and it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit. This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9 months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English wasn’t good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the password but wouldn’t share tell me. The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the “Kids Only” AOL channel. This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade, all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking about object oriented PHP. I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn’t really make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3 clan’s logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our website. As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could accomplish just about anything. By 1999/2000, I knew I’d wanted to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001/2002, I was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much computer science until college. And I didn’t really appreciate data structures and design until really starting my career. Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I was born in the 70s or 80s.
- watersb 4y ago
  We were all learning the same things as you were, at about the same time, on the job (at work). Many late hours, trying to keep up. You did very well, I think.
  - watersb 4y ago
    Maybe the main difference for me, as a 1970s-80s kid, was that I taught myself some small bits of assembly language programming. I feel very fortunate to have come along at a time where home computers were simple enough to understand. The circuits were literally black boxes, so no doubt the real old-timers would chuckle at this assertion: they had to build the computers out of discrete electrical components, one transistor at a time... But I could understand a CPU that had a single register, an "accumulator"...
neilv 4y ago
The optimism around computers in the 1980s is a noteworthy juxtaposition with that site itself. Given the impressively large number of different commercial surveillance companies to which that site is selling out everyone.
gregors 4y ago
They're playing 1 on 1. I loved breaking the backboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBluMt9taF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBluMt9taF4
tomohawk 4y ago
When I think about how freeing having a personal computer was back then, and then think about how computing devices are used now to track people, control speech, and generally keep people in line - I don't think of progress.
truthwhisperer 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Here's my H11: https://twitter.com/WalterBright https://twitter.com/WalterBright Yes, I built the computer, floppy drive, and terminal from Heathkits. They all worked first try! I really enjoyed those kits. Sadly, the only thing left is the terminal sitting in the garage.
kristopolous 4y ago
My favorite is from 1969. The friendly RCA computer monster, the octoputer and the octopeeper product. There's an entire campaign with this creature. There's even vintage mugs for sale https://file.vintageadbrowser.com/o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg https://file.vintageadbrowser.com/o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg Here it is when a "younger brother" https://live.staticflickr.com/2936/14696676103_bdb77a4827_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/2936/14696676103_bdb77a4827_b.... Surrounded by its users https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&name=... Slaying bugs https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/octoputer.png https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/octoputer... And winning the computer room https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&name=...
senectus1 4y ago
these are amazing. also a lot a very cringe inducing. but no less amazing.
analog31 4y ago
Well, two things haven't changed. The first is the ad, "you always find something in the last place you look, but a computer has 20000 places." The other is the need for a cup of coffee and a sandwich if you're really going to get down to some serious computing.
kornhole 4y ago
Brings back so many memories. Back then getting new stuff would save you money, but now things are going in opposite direction for some use cases. Supply chain has eliminated some new products such as Raspberry PIs. I have instead been buying up broken screen laptops for about $50 to get better powered mini servers.

222 points by davesailer 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

black_13 4y ago

transfire 4y ago

Magellan sounds better than what we have available now.

cowmix 4y ago
It was. At the time (31 years ago) I was the magician in my office because I was, somehow, able to find any file on our Novell file server via a content search-- no matter what program originated it.

causality0 4y ago

By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer. Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.

reaperducer 4y ago
Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990. People overestimate the speed of the spread of computers. I didn't have a computer where I worked until 1994. And then, it was shared by eight people. At my next job in 1995, I made them buy a computer for the office as a term of employment. At the time, I suggested that a laptop might be a good option, since the computer would be shared by three people. For the next two years, the sales guys made fun of me for wanting to put a computer, and for wanting one that fits on my lap. I later heard that when I left, they sold the computer. I wonder how those blissfully computer-free sales guys are doing today. When I worked for Westinghouse in 1996 was the first time I was in an office that has one computer per person. But not every department had computers at all. And most who did were just terminals hooked up to a Vax in accounting. When I worked for a large regional media company in 1997, everyone had a computer. Only a couple of them had internet access, and that was only e-mail. This was during the days when so many people were getting AOL at home that it became uselessly bogged down by its own popularity. 1999: Everyone in the office had their own computer. Not everyone used them. But at least they all had internet access. (OT: I'm sad that the macOS spell checker didn't know the word "Vax" just now)
- ddulaney 4y ago
  I know this isn’t relevant to the point about usage in 1990, but it shocks me (as somebody born in 1995) that over the course of 4 years you went from being ridiculed over demanding a computer to a computer on everyone’s desk. 4 years!
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Heres something for you to consider. I remember in the late 80s most people could not type. Typing was done by secretaries and was a specialized skill. There were (optional) for-credit classes in high school dedicated to teaching typing and nothing else. I got a bunch of part-time temp office jobs as a teenager because I could type fast, having grown up with computers, while my friends would get jobs at supermarkets or convenience stores, etc. The temp agencies had me do typing tests (on typewriters, not computers) before placing me. I blew them away at some ungodly WPM speed that I no longer remember. Not atypical by todays standards, I’m sure, but standards were different then. Often I would be the only person in a small office who could type. I certainly was the only male who could type. Everyone else was female. Imagine that today!
    - pcrh 4y ago
      Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US west coast at a research institute that the prof. would have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-write responses that the admin assistant would type into the computer :-D
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I worked for a large computer systems company starting in the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based email all along--we made the computers and the software. But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
    - watersb 4y ago
      I took a similar typing test on a typewriter and managed to get in 65 words per minute for the required text, due to my time with computers. But I barely passed, because there was no error correction allowed. No backspace key. Although business typewriters of the time often had the ability to let you correct at least one character, either by buffering a few keystrokes or with actual "white out" over-printing, it was just as common to find yourself working for someone with a cheap typewriter and a bottle of white paint. That was 1988. Summer job temp placement office at hometown university. I attended college far away, a place noted for its computer science department, where there were $20,000 workstations on campus for the department's students. I don't know how many students had their own machines in the dorm, but the ratio on our floor was 1/12.
Semaphor 4y ago
We (in Germany) didn’t have one until I was 12 in 1998, before that I’d visit my dad at work sometimes to play Prince of Persia on his office computer. I guess technically we had a Sinclair ZX81 in the cellar, but I wouldn’t find out about that till much later ;)
- ant6n 4y ago
  We (in Germany), by 1998, had 3 computers at home: a 400 mhz celeron connected to the internet, a hand me down 486 for my brother, and a hand me down 386 for me. All me friends were starting to get access to pentiums with tnts, by 2000 everybody was playing UT and counterstike.
VLM 4y ago
I suspect some statistical weirdness going on in the precise formulation of the survey question. I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely. Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although schools were owned by Apple II in those days... My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something like that.
- Transfinity 4y ago
  Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limited use outside of a few specific domains.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Call-out: we're also talking about mostly un-networked computers here. 1989 is the very beginning of "the Internet might be useful for general purposes by non-scientists." And incidentally, the same year BGP was dreamed up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_provider) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_... So most computers were running boxed retail software with extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at all).
    - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
      Computers were networking years before the rise of the Internet. BBSes were a thing in the 80s.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
MiddleEndian 4y ago
Anecdotally, I remember being excited for my dad to get a computer around 1994 or 1995, and it was a Mac IIci. A bunch of people I know got computers around then or within the next couple years, but before that it wasn't much of a thing. One of my earliest computer memories was using ClarisWorks Paint and spending (what seemed like) hours drawing a scarecrow while my parents watched, and then the computer crashed and it was all lost. My mom had a word processor around then as well (can't remember which came first), a single purpose device for writing with a keyboard, a CRT monitor, and a printer. Looked somewhat like this[0] but I can't remember whether it was the same brand or not. 0. https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg
- sircastor 4y ago
  I remember painting abstract primate pictures with MacPaint when I was quite young. I was sad when we got the new computer because I think MacPaint didn’t make the transition to system 7 or something, and my dad told me we couldn’t open the files. We also had a IIci. It came out I’m 89, and I was shocked to learn how insanely expensive it was at launch - $6000… $14k adjusted for inflation.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That was the era of really expensive computers, but each upgrade really seemed to do something phenomenally new - color or resolution or printer or 3D etc. Nowadays it’s hard to really notice the upgrades without running benchmarks.
sircastor 4y ago
We had a computer at home when I was a kid and in retrospect I was surprised to realize how unusual that was. I imagine it gave me far more advantage than I think.
bane 4y ago
Sometime in the mid-90s the local Microcenter had a deal on a $999 PC. IIR it was running Windows-95, but was otherwise a bare-minimum system. The "deal" was that the PC also had an ad infested border around the screen that ate up some non-trivial amount of the screen space. The line to buy it would through nearly every aisle in the store, out the front door and down the block, for over a week. People were asking for forwards on their paychecks, taking out loans, selling cars, anything they could do to get a computer at this magic price point. The main selling point? It had a modem and people could see what this "internet" business was all about for the first time.
flomo 4y ago
In 1990, it would have been somewhat rare for a college student to own a computer, but there were computer labs everywhere on campus and you had an email address, so it was clear they a part of modern life. They were priced in the 'used car' range so it wasn't impossible to own one. (edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
- luma 4y ago
  In my freshman year in 1993, I was the only person on my floor to haul a PC into the dorms. Across 4 buildings each with a dozen floors, there was maybe ten people who had computers in their room. The only reason I had one was because dad was an IBMer and he managed to obtain an XT 286 for me.
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    TIL there was an XT 286. I always thought that the 286 was exclusive to the AT.
  - NateLawson 4y ago
    Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16 with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most used DOS/Windows but the CS students dual booted to Linux (Slackware mostly, some SLS).
    - UncleSlacky 4y ago
      I remember being jealous of those doing Cybernetics at Reading (UK) as one of the big manufacturers donated a PC to every student on the course.
  - flomo 4y ago
    Similar, I had a Mac SE and was maybe the only person in my dorm section to have a new personal computer. But I also knew someone who had bought a Yugo, which was more expensive.
tacens 4y ago
my dad was taking a CS course starting in 1989 and they still had to send written programs by post mail to Warsaw because it would compile faster and "more accurately". from what he described the professors would do a "code review" but you only passed if it compiled there.

reactjavascript 4y ago

The technology has progressed. But have humans progressed?

tomcam 4y ago
Hell yes! Back then here in the USA we had only 2 sexes, 3 TV networks, and all libraries had were these printed website things they called “books”. Nowadays we have 57 sexes, 570 TV networks, and libraries in the city have evolved to their true purpose of sheltering the unhoused. And soon we won’t be burdened by our privacy belongings! https://twitter.com/wef/status/800965291215818752?s=21 https://twitter.com/wef/status/800965291215818752?s=21 I mean, who wouldn’t see this as leveling up?
agumonkey 4y ago
all i see is diminishing returns, marketing and fantasies. 4MB used to make people believe they'd do everything for life, accounting, programming, graphics whatever. It was infinite joy with only 320x200 points. Now you sell a 4k capable pocket datacenter running on 5W and people are barely satisfied for a year.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pixl97 4y ago
  Imagine never having sweets in your life, then the first time you having a peppermint your life would be changed. Now imagine a long life where you had all the sweets you could ever eat available all the time. Your attitude to them is going to be far different. In addition, back in the 90s computers were going to attract 'computer people' and the rest would ignore them. Now they are just a fact of life, even for the disinterested.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  TBF the pocket datacenter does way more than a vintage does though. However I do agree there is an inflation of customer expectation since the 90s. Just imagine: assuming tech evolves a lot slower. What would happen? People would still be OK, games would still be fun, business would carry on regardless.

ezconnect 4y ago

That was my little boy dream, to play the Bird vs Magic basketball video game. I had an Atari 2600 back then and was buying used computer magazine and when that was released it looked amazing compared to the stick figure basketball on the 2600

antiterra 4y ago
It was Dr. J vs Bird, and it felt slow and clunky at the time, but yes, miles better than anything on the Atari 2600. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bi...

codevark 4y ago

alangibson 4y ago

Everytime I see prices of hard drives back in the day, I get a feeling that's a mixture of claustrophobia, despair and shock.

300bps 4y ago
It’s all relative. My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-251 40 MB MFM hard drive on my 10 MHz Intel 8088 CPU. It cost about $300 at the time and perpetually remained about 80% full. The last hard drive I bought was a Seagate Exos X18 18 TB Sata hard drive on my 3.6 GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. It cost about $300 and has perpetually remained about 80% full.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  so true :D
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  My first hard drive was a PCs Limited (now known as Dell) "drive on a card" which was a competitor to the higher-priced 20MB HardCard (brand name as I recall). I'd have to go to another computer to try looking up the purchase price. There were hard drives mounted directly on an interface card, they would take up two slots, when five available slots max was pretty much standard.
stevenjgarner 4y ago
I remember buying an external 5GB hard drive for $4,999 with the first ProTools system back in 1991 (which itself cost much more than that). I was more amazed at having that much capacity than I am now buying yet another 4TB drive from Walmart for less than $100.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Don't forget to adjust for inflation. A $4.5k disk drive in 1990 would cost around $9k today. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Pixel art actually displayed nicer on CRT monitors, and DOS interfaces were pretty fast and keyboard optimized, and there wasn't an industry dedicated to spying on you. So not always for the better.

hasbot 4y ago

I got into computers in high school around 1980. I used to read Byte magazine and studied every ad. So exciting! My senior year, after saving and saving my income from my $2.85/hour after school job I bought an Apple ][+ for around $2000.

russellbeattie 4y ago
The craziest thing about Byte Magazine was that it was published in Peterborough, NH. I was friends with the editor's son in the early 90s... If you've ever been to that area of NH, you'd be amazed that a high tech magazine of Byte's stature was published there. I'd be surprised if the town even had decent broadband before the 2000s. Physically and culturally, it's about as far away from Silicon Valley (where I live now) as you can get.

CPLX 4y ago

It’s definitely different. Progress is a value judgement.

t0mmyb0y 4y ago

jmclnx 4y ago

I miss the days when everything was simple ASCII Text :)

hansel_der 4y ago
thou beeing german, i still use the us-layout and avoid umlauts when dealing with computers. some deep habits

sumthinprofound 4y ago

I recall alot of advertisements in computer magazines from the late 80s featuring bikini girls and sexual innuendo.

hansel_der 4y ago
that's still a thing
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Where? I don’t see it in the US at all.

Jeema101 4y ago

I miss those days. I feel like back then computers naturally encouraged exploration and learning. There was no internet, or even modems in most cases, so there was no alternative but exploration - trying to figure out what all you could do with this strange piece of hardware. I'm not entirely sure I'm just jaded by time - I feel like maybe computers became commodity appliances, for an entirely different crowd, but I stayed the same.

sircastor 4y ago
I grew up with a Mac so my experience was a little different, but I’m amazed at people who’s first experience sitting down at a computer was starting at an unforgiving blinking cursor.
thunderbong 4y ago
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. - Oscar Wilde.

VLM 4y ago

The article focuses almost entirely on hardware especially hardware prices. Then there's the usual confusion about inflation. In a theoretical sense a $3K hard drive would be like spending $9K now, but with massive economic decline and income inequality the real comparison is in the 80s families could scare up $3K if they really wanted, but now people can only afford $1K phones with exotic high interest rate financing, so people were either three times richer back then or nine times richer back then. Either way times are not good now. The point of an ad for a $3K hard drive from the 80s is not that it would in some theoretical sense cost $9K now or would store a million times as much data now, but that short decades ago people could afford to spend $3K and now they're stressed at spending merely $300. Another few decades of permanent economic decline and we as a people will be stressed at spending only $30. Most of the consumer-level ads try to link their product with success and intelligence, whereas all advertisements now focus on competitively showing off your former wealth or some variation on "We are woke so our products must be good" LOL. Tech ads in 2022 look a lot more like mechanical gold watch ads in the 70s or designer jeans ads from the 80s. The other point missed in the article is computer mags from my youth were absolutely chock full of software advertisements for $1000 compilers and $500 word processor and spreadsheet software. When I was a little kid a nice C compiler cost about half my dad's car, then as a teen you could get a decent K+R compatible compiler for a hundred bucks from radio shack (I paid 50 on sale using money I saved) and as a young adult, development tools are all free and you download linux and emacs and start writing code for the cost of some bbs download time, and later internet download time. Most of the software that we take for granted as being free today in 2022 used to sell for at least hundreds of dollars in the 80s and at least $50 in the early 90s, then the internet hit and you just download gcc "for free".

pixl97 4y ago
Eh, your economics have some issues here. Back then people were extremely stressed about spending that much. At least where I lived people could not spend that much, and a lot of computers that were bought were with financing. On of the big things that has changed is the massive increase in housing costs and rents causing all kinds of economic issues.
beezle 4y ago

jkmcf 4y ago

Bird vs Johnson/Jordan, possibly what is in that picture, is one of my all time favorite games.

jdkee 4y ago
Also one of my favorite Atari 800 games, Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. See https://www.giantbomb.com/dr-j-and-larry-bird-go-one-on-one/3030-13770/ https://www.giantbomb.com/dr-j-and-larry-bird-go-one-on-one/...
- jkmcf 4y ago
  OMG How did I forget this one! It wasn't Magic, it was Dr J (and I'm from Philly...)

marcodiego 4y ago

These ads show not only how much we progressed in terms of technology but also as being a society with less prejudice and misogyny. Take a look at the role of women on those photos. Disgusting!

ajross 4y ago
That's what I find striking too. Likewise there's precisely one photo in the entire collection showing a non-white face (and it's a school room of kids, not "customers"). I remember reading these ads; it wasn't that long ago at all.
- felix318 4y ago
  Conversely people looking at current adverts 50 years from now will wonder “where did all the white people go?” (I’m not white and I don’t care, it’s just an observation)
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    I dunno, they’re still there, they’re just not the only people?
    - teakettle42 4y ago
      I visited an indoor mall recently, in an area with some of the whitest demographics in the nation, but also (since I know the stereotypes about fat Americans) the healthiest. Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color. Even for athletic wear. Whatever weird fetishism the marketing world has going on now, it’s absolutely not representative relative to local demographics, nor nation-wide demographics.
      - ajross 4y ago
        > Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color. Obviously I can't speak to whatever local ads you saw, but I don't believe the "almost without exception" for an instant. Here's the front page of Forever 21, sort of a reasonable approximation to an "indoor mall" environment: https://www.forever21.com/ https://www.forever21.com/ Out of 55 models with faces that I see, 27 are white (or at least plausibly white-presenting, obviously there's some ambiguity here as there always is with any kind of ethnic definition). So... 50% almost exactly. A bit lower than the population at large (though probably much closer to the younger/urban target market). Hardly a lack of representation, which is what you claim to be seeing. But my guess is that absent these numbers, you'd look at that page and think "almost without exception..." right?

swayvil 4y ago

Our numbers certainly have increased. And everybody likes that.

alkaloid 4y ago

I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983. We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted. Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.

synu 4y ago
Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on it and basically never stopped coding since then. It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.
- alkaloid 4y ago
  > It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer. Isn't this the honest truth.
btgeekboy 4y ago
We weren’t well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for lack of space - and the rest is history.
- bombcar 4y ago
  For sooooo long the upgrade cycle was so short that you could live quite cheaply and comfortably by inserting yourself in the right place in the chain. In college I’d upgrade every three to six months and sell the old system off to someone for a good percentage of the new hotness.
haolez 4y ago
Same here. Got my 386 in 1994 (in Brazil nonetheless!).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

A really good place to see old computer ads in context is on magazine archives. Archive.org has the BYTE archives. https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE It is fun to go back and browse them.

usrn 4y ago

I honestly think nothing has really changed. You can see SCO saying "We have graphics now! People will want to use Unix on the desktop now" all the way back in the 80s. Computers keep getting bigger but the software keeps up with it. All that's really changed is that we have more computers since the smallest ones are so cheap, even so we had cheap MCUs back then.

pbw 4y ago

A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out? ‪If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress. ‬

masswerk 4y ago
Now you could argue that there’s less space on a modern drive, given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with mostly text files. I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac, which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100 with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon, HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before. Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file, you may need an entire drive for dependencies… To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space. As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you’re selling billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost.
- pbw 4y ago
  You are right the more space we have the more we dream up ways to use it. However I wouldn't go as far to say "drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them". People still store text but it's now basically free. Images and audio are heading towards free. Videos still add up. You specifically call out executable programs which I agree have grown in size very rapidly. So I think it depends on what you are putting on the drive. I wouldn't say all space gains have been eaten up by bigger files.

ivraatiems 4y ago

Something that I often find frustrating about modern technology is how little we do with the vast amounts of processing power we have. A lot of what we are doing now - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing - was done by machines with a fraction of the computing power two decades ago. What does it matter if the numbers get bigger if the use cases are the same?

colejohnson66 4y ago
Modern software benefits from increased computational power because it allows new features and speeding up older ones. Sure, “office” apps don’t benefit much, but you’re ignoring many fields where they do benefit. For example, the field of 3D graphics. Games and animated movies have become a lot more realistic and feature filled thanks to more powerful graphics cards. In fact, Disney specifically puts a lot of effort into making hair realistic. That was impractical a decade ago, and impossible a decade prior.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  You're absolutely right about 3D graphics, but how much time does the average desktop computer user spend rendering hair? Even if you need bigtime compute power for video games, there are game streaming services where someone else's computer will do that for you. I have a high-end graphics card and all the processing power I need to play games... but I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I?
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    > I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I? How is this different from owning anything? I have a bike, but I’m not riding it literally all the time. But I still don’t think owning it is a waste.
- ant6n 4y ago
  Meh. Are the stories being created with games getting better? For example, Half Life and Portal are pretty modern and immersive and run on some 20-year-old hardware.

dwighttk 4y ago

Man for me it was realizing my phone has ~ 200x the flops of the Cray XMP from Jurassic Park.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

Thank you for sharing this.

maestroia 4y ago

"By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer." As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no practical reason for them.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
There are several anachronistic mistakes in this article. I think the author is perhaps too young to have lived in those times.

russellbeattie 4y ago

Who still has their first computer? My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 is sitting quietly in my garage, in a box that contains it, the TV adapter, the Color Basic manuals, a Radio Shack joystick and a half dozen cassette tapes with programs I wrote as an 10yo in 1982. If anyone at the Computer History Museum reads this: Get the 70s/80s micro computers out from behind the display cases!!! CHM has at least one of every computer you can think of, why not take the extras and put them on the floor for visitors to play with? It's like torture wandering through the displays and not being able to play with all those computers and video games you lusted over as a kid.

deathanatos 4y ago
I'm a bit younger than a TRS-80, but yes, I do. It's at my parent's house. A 1989 Compaq Deskpro running OS/2. AFAIK, it still runs.
indymike 4y ago
I have a couple TI-994a's and a C64 out in the garage that were given to me as gifts... not the original (that died a long time ago). I learned to program on the TI, TI-BASIC first, then Extended Basic, then some Assembler. The C64 was great because you had to understand how to work directly with hardware. On the TI, you would nice library call like CALL SOUND. On the C64 you'd have to POKE everything to the correct address to coax sound out of it (often what you would do in a single line on the TI would take 4-5 lines on the C64, but the C64 was fast, and had lots of memory). Good times.
samatman 4y ago
I still have my first keyboard, an IBM Model F. The PC-AT which went with it was Ship of Theseuse'd into the late 486 era, I abandoned it when tower cases became standard.
lakkal 4y ago
My Atari 800 died in a lightning storm in 1983, but I still have the replacement 800XL downstairs, with floppy drives, cassette drive, thermal printer, and 300 baud modem. An Ape Face paralell port adapeer for the Epson RX-80, which I don't have anymore. Lots of floppies and cartridges, too. And JForth along with the manual.

johnohara 4y ago

The oldest and most mind-boggling process ever devised and foisted upon readers lies at the bottom of many of those ads -- "circle ### on reader service card." It was a cruel joke for the ad to spark your interest whereby you would circle the number, mail in the bingo card to the publisher (3-5 days), whose lead management group would process it (3-5 days), then send the lead to the company or dealer (3-5 days), who would assign it to a sales rep (3-5 days), who was working their leads and getting back to potential customers (3-5 days), who would then ignore the call because they had lost interest in the product or couldn't remember requesting information. Compare that with today where making a phone call to the sales team takes too long (3-5 minutes) and it's easier to just go get the damn information yourself.

moron4hire 4y ago

I first started working in web development in 2005. We had Pentium 4 servers, running at what would probably feel like 1ghz today (P4 had some pipeline problems), with probably a gig or 2 of RAM, on-prem. Core count? No idea. I'm guessing 4 at the most, but it might have only been 2. We usually ran two servers, one for app server and one for databases, though there were frequently multiple apps and multiple databases on those servers. Such a machine probably cost around $3k at the time, (IDK, I'm just guessing. Also, inflation has been about 50% since then). Most of that cost was probably in disk arrays. I was working on GIS apps, so we had "a lot" of data at rest. We had dedicated DBAs and sys admins. Most of the difficulty in getting applications built was A) being young and not knowing what I was doing, B) communicating and getting approved configuration changes with the sys admins for whatever stupid thing we were being asked to do by bizdev, C) communicating and getting approved scheme changes in the database with the DBAs without having a local copy we could modify at will to test anything before going to staging. Today, I have my servers in the cloud. I'm given 2 cores at 1ghz with like 4gb of RAM. It's about $2k a year. Every year. Or in that ballpark. It's not a huge diff from 17 years ago. My laptop has 14 cores running at atleast 3.5ghz, with 64gb of RAM. Plus a massive GPU. It also cost about $2k. I work in VR so I spend that every two years. The server backends I build now are not significantly different than I ever did. The front ends are significantly more complex (I thought I was pretty hot shit making a 2D graphics API in JS out of absolutely positioned DIVs as "pixels" back then, before Canvas was a thing, and now I do full motion 3D in VR at 120hz). So IDK. I probably got some minor details wrong, I'm not going to look absolutely everything up. Take it for a rough approximation. One thing that strikes me is that, operationally, things are vastly different, but not necessarily easier. I don't have to get anyone to approve anything anymore, but that's mostly because I'm the one in charge now and I know what I'm doing now. Front end tooling has improved thanks to TypeScript, but that's also come with massive amounts of other complications because it still needs to be JS at the end of the day. NPM has made it easier to get and manage dependencies, but the creaking tower of transpilers and bundling tools has clawed a lot of those gains back. I used to be able to clone a repo, start visual studio, hit F5, and after about 45s for a full, first time rebuild, I'd be in the app. Now I need to restore dependencies, make sure all the build tools are at the right versions, make sure all the separate build tools are running in the right order and time. Sometimes it doesn't work, because it's not clear why TypeScript is using VS' outdated lib.d.ts files that install by default instead of the ones that are in my node_modules. It "works", but it's deeply dissatisfying. I can never tell if introducing a new project into the repo is going to break first-time setup. I'm able to do more on the project I have already setup, but seeing up new projects has gotten so difficult that I often find myself so mentally overwhelmed (disgust, avoidance, etc) that I just don't, I go back to working on the one project instead of trying something new. Don't know where I'm going with this, but there it be.

MarcoZavala 4y ago

fuzzfactor 4y ago

Victor Borge in his later years here in the Verbatim ad, was a European keyboard virtuoso who made his way in the US by adding a distinctive comedy element to his solo touring performances. So it's only approprate to have him as a spokesman sitting at a computer keyboard, with his document looking not much different than sheet music. And he looks like he is tickling the ivories there, sticking mainly to the black keys I see. Maybe a bit like Irving Berlin, who was the most popular songwriter for so many decades, and who only played on the black keys. Interestingly, Berlin's personal Steinway is now in the Smithsonian since it is a one-of-a-kind chromatic piano where he could mechanically shift the musical key the black keys were tuned for. So he could get together with artists like Sinatra and play his tunes as originally written but in the singers' preferred key. Now Borge was actually quite improvisational for a clasical musician. He could get up there, introduce himself and play a number of 30 to 60 second interludes, and get away with saying or merely acting like he hadn't made his mind up what full piece to play. Then there could be a little monologue for a while which was one good reason so many were there to see him, but regardless of how excellent that was, the elephant in the room since the beginning had always been the significant percentage of the crowd who wanted nothing but the music. Zappa had this too. Borge would flip up his coat-tails, move closer to the microphone and say in his European accent "Do you want to hear Great Music? Classics?" He then quickly extends his arms in the characteristic way for more freedom of movement, puts his hands on the keys, moves closer to the microphone again and says "Too bad!"

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> the Apple Laser Printer quickly became the preferred printer of choice for computer owners of all brands. In 1984? No, it did not. Most everyone was using dot matrix printers in 1984.

tlb 4y ago
It's the one everyone preferred, but not many could afford.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
For business printing the standard was the daisy wheel - which was insanely loud and sounded like a machine gun. Between 2X and 6X as expensive as a dot matrix. So around $2k for a mid-price model and $4k for a faster and more reliable model at the high end. Dot matrix printers were relatively affordable. But still expensive. Maybe $300 for a budget model, up to a few k for a high end model with a 132 chars and a double density print head. Adjusted prices are roughly 2.7X. So almost $800 for a basic dot matrix, up to a ballpark $10k for a high end printer. Just for printing. Compare with today where a mono laser costs ~$150 for a basic model, $300-$600 for added scanning and copying, and $400-$800 for a colour laser with extra features.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Thanks for this. I was fortunate to have an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer in 1983. My father bought it for me. I had no idea they were so expensive - at least $1500 in todays dollars (I could only find the price of the MX-80 in 1983, not the FX-80 which was even more expensive). I wish my father was alive for me to thank him yet again for this marvelous gift that must have put him out quite a bit.

gumby 4y ago

I remember many of those ads from when they appeared! I like that the author showed a lot of ads with girls operating the computer. Typically it was boys (or whatever) with his sister just passively standing by. Of course it was the 80s and apparently it was quite common for the “family computer” to be installed in the son’s room. TBH my favorite part was being reminded of the absurd clothing people wore in those days and the incredible clutter of stuff people had everywhere.

mlom 4y ago

this doesn't show we've progressed at all, it just shows we're still distracted by colors and lights

nixnax 4y ago

gernb 4y ago

I always feel amazed when I see a large micro-SD card (1TB for example) and compare it to my Atari 800 which had three 16k ram cartridges, each larger than an iPhone Max. So this micro-SD card the size of my thumbnail is 67 million times the memory of one of those cartridges. http://www.vintagecomputer.net/atari/800/atari_800_48kRAM-10KROM.JPG http://www.vintagecomputer.net/atari/800/atari_800_48kRAM-10...

IMSAI8080 4y ago
And one SD card could probably hold every commercially released title for every machine ever released combined up until about the CD era started in the 90s.

rmason 4y ago

Those ads really take me back. I had a college friend tell me in 1974 that everyone would have a computer on their desk by 1984. We ruthlessly mocked him for it. But in 1983 I got a computer on my desk at the fertilizer plant. There was zero software for the fertilizer industry at the time. So I started with Lotus 123 and taught myself the macro language and set out to create it. Then I convinced my boss to buy me a copy of dBase II and set out to learn that as well. I was spending every work night until 11 pm. Got tired of that so I withdrew $3500 out of my meager savings and bought an IBM XT clone from a new company in Flint. I remember adding a modem so that I could explore CompuServe, a large mainframe based online service by H & R Block.

robrorcroptrer 4y ago

Seems to me there's not been much progress.

beebeepka 4y ago
On the contrary. I think surveillance has progressed considerably and our transition into a full blown global dystopia is on track

johnklos 4y ago

Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-centric? All the world isn't a modern computer and/or running Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet. Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank the Google Flavor Aid?

josephcsible 4y ago
WebP is a standard. And serving different files to different user agents makes the problem you're describing worse, not better.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- johnklos 4y ago
  It's a standard, but it isn't a universal standard. Know the difference. Until a standard has both been accepted by a significant majority, and there has been plenty of time for the standard to be adopted, it's bad to simply turn on a feature and say, "screw you" to everyone who has an older device or computer that can't run the latest software. Serving different files to different user agents is not desirable, sure, but it's better than this crap - have the latest or it doesn't work. You know this, I think. So is it that people are shitty and elitist, or is that people are just ignorant? If the former, then we can't change that - people will be shitty if they choose to be shitty. Sounds like you advocate for that. If people are just ignorant about the fact that their web site doesn't work on older phones, tablets, Macs, or older non-Chrome browsers, then they should be told.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    It isn't just the Chromium monoculture that supports WebP, though. Firefox and Safari both do too. What other browsers do you want to support it before you'll consider it universal? And for people with operating systems too old to run any browser version that supports WebP, they're also way behind on security updates, so we should be encouraging them to upgrade to a newer OS.

drewcoo 4y ago

Moore's Law porn. As to how far we have progressed, I'd rather see us talk about how we interact with technology and how it changes our lives. Smart phones are powerful computers. They are ubiquitous. They're the computers we all have now. What have they accomplished? I can always contact someone, though loneliness seems to have increased. People can also contact me all the time, sometimes with video. Nobody wears watches because they carry phones, so we missed the Dick Tracy future. Nobody can be lost anymore because they (and many other entities) always know where on earth they are. All of those things are absent from the old ads. Our "progress" is mostly about surveillance whereas the old ads were all about what individuals could accomplish. And there's definitely progress in how things are marketed to us. Aren't those old ads clunky?

ozzythecat 4y ago

This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn’t afford it, and I’m not sure what drove him to make the purchase. I do know he used a credit card, couldn’t make the payments, and it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit. This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9 months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English wasn’t good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the password but wouldn’t share tell me. The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the “Kids Only” AOL channel. This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade, all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking about object oriented PHP. I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn’t really make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3 clan’s logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our website. As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could accomplish just about anything. By 1999/2000, I knew I’d wanted to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001/2002, I was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much computer science until college. And I didn’t really appreciate data structures and design until really starting my career. Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I was born in the 70s or 80s.

watersb 4y ago
We were all learning the same things as you were, at about the same time, on the job (at work). Many late hours, trying to keep up. You did very well, I think.
- watersb 4y ago
  Maybe the main difference for me, as a 1970s-80s kid, was that I taught myself some small bits of assembly language programming. I feel very fortunate to have come along at a time where home computers were simple enough to understand. The circuits were literally black boxes, so no doubt the real old-timers would chuckle at this assertion: they had to build the computers out of discrete electrical components, one transistor at a time... But I could understand a CPU that had a single register, an "accumulator"...

neilv 4y ago

The optimism around computers in the 1980s is a noteworthy juxtaposition with that site itself. Given the impressively large number of different commercial surveillance companies to which that site is selling out everyone.

gregors 4y ago

They're playing 1 on 1. I loved breaking the backboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBluMt9taF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBluMt9taF4

tomohawk 4y ago

When I think about how freeing having a personal computer was back then, and then think about how computing devices are used now to track people, control speech, and generally keep people in line - I don't think of progress.

truthwhisperer 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

Here's my H11: https://twitter.com/WalterBright https://twitter.com/WalterBright Yes, I built the computer, floppy drive, and terminal from Heathkits. They all worked first try! I really enjoyed those kits. Sadly, the only thing left is the terminal sitting in the garage.

kristopolous 4y ago

My favorite is from 1969. The friendly RCA computer monster, the octoputer and the octopeeper product. There's an entire campaign with this creature. There's even vintage mugs for sale https://file.vintageadbrowser.com/o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg https://file.vintageadbrowser.com/o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg Here it is when a "younger brother" https://live.staticflickr.com/2936/14696676103_bdb77a4827_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/2936/14696676103_bdb77a4827_b.... Surrounded by its users https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&name=... Slaying bugs https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/octoputer.png https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/octoputer... And winning the computer room https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&name=...

senectus1 4y ago

these are amazing. also a lot a very cringe inducing. but no less amazing.

analog31 4y ago

Well, two things haven't changed. The first is the ad, "you always find something in the last place you look, but a computer has 20000 places." The other is the need for a cup of coffee and a sandwich if you're really going to get down to some serious computing.

kornhole 4y ago

Brings back so many memories. Back then getting new stuff would save you money, but now things are going in opposite direction for some use cases. Supply chain has eliminated some new products such as Raspberry PIs. I have instead been buying up broken screen laptops for about $50 to get better powered mini servers.