> Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with mom+dad+girl+boy.
Hoo boy, are you naive. I still have computer mags from the 1980s (and maybe I have a pack-rat problem, but that's not important now).
A awful lot of the hardware ads had buxom nubile while female models, sometimes draped over the machine, sometimes with a sultry expression (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?), often with caked-on hooker makeup. The software ads almost always had some young white man with an IBM-approved white shirt and pocket protector.
Ads in popular computer mags in the 1980s were definitely target-marketed towards white male hetero people. To claim the advertizing was ineffective and such people "just wanted" the devices is disingenuous at best.
> (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?),
Hmm...and young boys are the target market for backup tape systems?
Maybe I should have been more specific: the context was home computers, not the professional systems. I thought that much was obvious.
And even there, do you seriously think that the motivation for those ads was "oh, we must make sure that women don't enter the profession" or was it more "we know that 95+% of our target audience is male" and so they used the same sort of tactics that were used to sell cars and auto tuning products[1]?
Hoo boy, are you naive. I still have computer mags from the 1980s (and maybe I have a pack-rat problem, but that's not important now).
A awful lot of the hardware ads had buxom nubile while female models, sometimes draped over the machine, sometimes with a sultry expression (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?), often with caked-on hooker makeup. The software ads almost always had some young white man with an IBM-approved white shirt and pocket protector.
Ads in popular computer mags in the 1980s were definitely target-marketed towards white male hetero people. To claim the advertizing was ineffective and such people "just wanted" the devices is disingenuous at best.