It was an exciting time. Ads were one way to collect scarce information on the state of the art.
If you hoped to make money in the microcomputer field, as I did, you learned a lot: what corporate purchasers were thinking about, what consumer trends were happening, which companies were successful enough to pay for full-page ads over a period of months, and indirectly what systems were selling because of third-party ads.
If you were making the buying decision for yourself on what would be the equivalent of about $10,000 with of equipment, all market signals were worth observing. It was one thing for Apple to spend a lot on Apple ][ ads, but it was something else entirely to see how quickly the notion of IBM PC compatibility was featured in software or accessories by companies that weren't IBM.
I purchased some magazines 50% because of their ads and 50% for editorial; in the case of PC Shopper, a tabloid-size magazine that could be 600-800 pages, perhaps 70% because of ads, 30% editorial.
The meta perspective was fun too: no one really knew the best ways to advertise so there were many different approaches early on. Games had extremely fanciful cover art that had zero to do with the actual rendered graphics. Infocom's ads for their popular text-only ads were, duh, all text and had extraordinarily good copy. Ads for database managers ended up being DBMS tutorials that too often ended up mentioning recipes. Obviously I never saw an Apple or IBM or Commodore machine hoisted up on someone's kitchen counter, recipe opened, IRL.
It wasn't always creative or interesting though. Even 40 years ago my friend and I were making fun of endless pictures showing two white people in front of a monitor, with one pointing at it and the other trying to look excitedly at 80-column text or a 4-color pie chart in 320x200 resolution.
I work in advertising. What’s going on with this website? This appears to be a very standard ad arbitrage website, as you often see promoted via Native ads. The newsletter has only 5k subs, but it’s possible this is sufficient to farm out —- in effect —- genuine HN submissions via various real users. But you don’t normally see websites like this making the front page of HN regularly, and this website has been on the front page a dozen+ times. It’s probably genuine, but it’s worth looking into whether or not there’s upvote bots involved… just a note for Dang. I love the content too so perhaps real. But I suspect someone is running this site and promoting it here as a business (people seem to like it though, and the ads are bearable).
Interesting thought. Although: I don't see any ads on the webpage, which makes it even stranger? Am I missing something? PS: No, I don't have an adblocker - on purpose.
Man, how much Wonder these ads invited back then, purely from the novelty factor. Hard to get excited about tech the same way these days, because it’s all become so ubiquitous and banal, and there’s less and less novelty now. Sounds pessimistic I know, but where are the companies/ads that create new Wonder?
I think the novel and interesting tech is still happening, its just that without the colorful ads for it on TV, and without the software being packaged up and sold with pretty box art that you can physically hold, it doesn't feel as much like a capital-E Experience. It's probably the Internet's fault that we don't do things like that anymore, but the upside is that we now have access to so many ideas and applications from all over, even ones that aren't commercially viable.
Some that look exciting to me are: an AI that lets you animate still photos realistically [1], a simple website that guides you to discover new parks, eateries, and other places near you [2], an AI that colorizes old black-and-white photos/video [3], a Street View style map of the game world from "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", with some 1st person 360 degree photos [4], and a tiny game engine that lets you distribute your whole game physically via printed QR codes [5].
If marketing and graphic design people ever felt like getting together to do some 'side projects', I vote that they should make print ads for apps/websites that they like :)
That stuff is cool and all, but revolutionary? Nah, it's all predictable. Doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of the early days of computers and the internet which was opening up the world and changing lifestyles
This is just 20/20 hindsight. To most people back then it didn't feel completely revolutionary, because it was still niche and pretty limited in what computers could do.
VR might be revolutionary, but we won't know until after several more years, when it's either gone mainstream or clearly stalled out. I know there are people who will immediately nitpick that VR isn't revolutionary, which is ironic because this happens any time there's a nascent potentially revolutionary technology about: people nitpicking that it's not good enough yet, or arguing that it's not compelling (which is often just because it's not mature enough yet).
You don't know if anything's actually revolutionary until it's mature and saturated the market, but by then it's not really new anymore, so it's easy to dismiss it as old hat. By the time smartphones had percolated down to the point where even working-class randos had them, we'd had iOS and Android for several years, and of course earlier forms of smartphones for several years or more before those.
For a long time they were dismissed as mere "toys for techies" with limited real-world application for the regular person. Which was true, until it suddenly wasn't.
People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.
The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.
So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.
You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.
> So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.
For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)
Until then only big companies could afford a computer to manage their data and accounting, etc. Microcomputers changed that and made the hardware available to every company.
VisiCalc on the software side was the killer app that relatively normal people could learn and use to improve their business work. Spreadsheets were certainly a revolution.
On the home front, affordable microcomputers arrived and it was widely recognised that the revolution was here. Computers were the future and every parent should get one to prepare their kids (ok, sons) for it. This explains the marketing around microcomputers being for families.
I think ai stuff will have a similar wonder when it's capabilities for improvising things becomes deeper. The only difference is that now some people are understably scared of the implications of such impacts relative to the internet's growth which was very optimistic.
This is just nostalgia talking. The cutting edge of things is magical but it's also janky, so look for relatively janky new things right now. PC VR you could probably throw into that category; there's magical experiences to be had, but it involves a fair amount of effort, and there's no shortage of jank.
Along similar lines, the Steam Deck and similar mobile gaming PC's are pretty neat, but again, kinda janky.
I'm curious if anyone remembers this--I remember an ad, probably in Byte magazine, for a laptop (this was way before laptops were commonplace.) It was thin and kind of teardrop shaped, and instead of BASIC, the built in programming language was Ada. I doubt it ever shipped, because 30 years later I've never been able to find anything about it, though I'd be curious to know if my memory is playing tricks on me.
that could be it. I wouldn't have thought APL just because, well APL is so far out there with so many custom glyphs. Thanks, I'll have to dig more into this.
I'm finding it hard to imagine that you'd get built-in ADA running on 80s hardware, or that there would be much of a market for it if you did.
ADA is a mil-spec compiled language often used for embedded control. It took a long time to implement a full compiler and the smallest machines it ran on were minis.
The closest thing - and it's really not close at all - is probably the FORTH-based Jupiter Ace, designed by the people who designed the ZX Spectrum.
That's incorrect. Ada was available from multiple sources for CP/M and DOS machines. For example, there was Artek Ada, SuperSoft Ada, JANUS/Ada, alsys Ada, Telesoft Ada, ...
For no particular reason, I tried to find out more about the Decision Master (edit: not Maker, thanks for the correction) software, but all I could find was the same ad (with some more text that's cut off) in Byte magazine 1981/01.
Right. Pretty sure I searched for the right name. Interesting that they kept it up for over twenty years, I figured this was a piece of software lost to time.
One interesting thing about these ads is that they were the thing that helped create the market. Contemporary ads are just there to convince people that a given computer is better than another given computer; the old ads also had to convince people and companies that computers were worth having at all
I think some VR and AR devices are kind of in the creating the market category now. Or recently and over the next few years.
To me if Lynx R1 had a little bit better field of view and just worked slightly better then that type of device could be a game changer.
Over the next few years the comfort and capabilities of AR devices may actually make desktop computing for productivity obsolescent.
I think there is also going to be a major revolution one or two decades down the line with brain computer interfaces. I wonder what type of ad you need to create that market.
But also maybe one or more like two decades down the line we can probably expect real compute-in-memory devices.
The "metaverse" still has some competition going. It may turn out that much of what people call the metaverse is a new type of browser that uses web assembly and a special shading language or something to create a type of networked operating system on top of various platforms. There is still room for competition in determining those standards.
Hopefully one or more of these paradigm shifts will provide at least a brief period of somewhat open competition.
And back then computing products were wildly different. Hardware and software was all proprietary and sold through relatively few retailers. Entire segments of industry were rushing to figure out how to fit in the computer age. And it was all super expensive. Ads were likely explaining things customers had no idea about.
Is it just me, or do all these photos have some odd sexual tension in them? Perhaps its societal conditioning, but I don't seem to have the same response from modern days ads (even though objectively modern ads are more sexualized).
A related question to ask is what takes more effort? Adding that tension? Or removing it? What is the baseline state of the fictional people in these ads, assuming they were like real people?
Many seem forced and weird, like the couple having a romantic evening playing Atari 2600 Combat. Maybe it's the forced closeness so they can fit in the picture while doing pogfaces?
The Internet Archive has lots of computer magazines from that era. It's interesting to plug prices from the advertisements into an inflation calculator to see what the price would be in current dollars. Lots of very simple games that cost about $80 in modern money. No wonder piracy was so rampant with teens and kids.
In 1980 it cost $6,000 to get a computer with 64K memory and 512K storage. That's roughly $15,000 in today's dollars! Another thing that I've always found interesting is Apple tends to keep their computers in the $1,500-$3,000 range, going back to the Apple II. Today for that money (which is actually less than half the value) you're getting undreamed-of processing power, portability, memory and storage. It's been amazing watching this industry over the past 45 years.
But the 80's were truly special - that's when computers went mainstream, Big Tech didn't yet exist, and every manufacturer had slightly different ideas on what computers should be doing.
There's a machine described in here which is compatible with both the Apple ][ and CP/M systems, at a comparable price point to either one. As a naive buyer, why would I have _not_ purchased this system?
Because most peeps were frightened of off-brand purchases. The Laser 128 and Orange Micro were perfectly fine Apple ][ run-alikes, but Apple dealers spread enough FUD about compatibility that you had to be brave to go that route. Tandy had a heck of a time getting people to buy their PC compatibles, and were successful mainly cause every town had a RadioShack w/ a T1000 running Lotus & a few games to verify basic compatibility. Laser didn't have that benefit in the 80s. And if you were hip to CP/M you probably had the cash to buy a real Apple and add a MicroSoft CP/M card.
I actually can't see the content because of all the ads. Or... in other words... modern ads are making it hard for me to see the old ads i came here to see... ;)
I was glad to see that most of the consumer-oriented ads in this post involved daughters using the computer. The reality was that often the new computer purchase would go in the son's room, and most ads reflected that bias as well.
Also the "decision maker" ad has a woman thinking, "It must use Baysian, weighted factor analysis and..." which is an approach back in fashion!
There's an ad for the Franklin Ace 1200, an Apple ][+ clone (although it had lower case and 64K it really wasn't an Apple //e clone as the //e hadn't come out yet and so the machine "looked" like a ][+ to software in programs that checked). I had the earlier model, the Franklin Ace 1000, which didn't have included disc drives.
Accessibility for one. Sophistication for another.
At that point not everyone was comfortable with writing a check for $1000-2000, stuffing it in an envelope and hoping to get a computer back in the mail.
Apples were in computer stores, the Ace, perhaps, not so much.
Having an actual use case to run both Apple and CP/M software was rare. It was also complicated. If you were an end user running CP/M on your Apple, it very well just stayed that way. Hard enough to wrangle a single computer system, much less two completely different ones.
While the value proposition of the Ace was there, a market large enough to leverage it was not.
And by the time the market was experienced enough to appreciate the system, the IBM was coming out.
If you hoped to make money in the microcomputer field, as I did, you learned a lot: what corporate purchasers were thinking about, what consumer trends were happening, which companies were successful enough to pay for full-page ads over a period of months, and indirectly what systems were selling because of third-party ads.
If you were making the buying decision for yourself on what would be the equivalent of about $10,000 with of equipment, all market signals were worth observing. It was one thing for Apple to spend a lot on Apple ][ ads, but it was something else entirely to see how quickly the notion of IBM PC compatibility was featured in software or accessories by companies that weren't IBM.
I purchased some magazines 50% because of their ads and 50% for editorial; in the case of PC Shopper, a tabloid-size magazine that could be 600-800 pages, perhaps 70% because of ads, 30% editorial.
The meta perspective was fun too: no one really knew the best ways to advertise so there were many different approaches early on. Games had extremely fanciful cover art that had zero to do with the actual rendered graphics. Infocom's ads for their popular text-only ads were, duh, all text and had extraordinarily good copy. Ads for database managers ended up being DBMS tutorials that too often ended up mentioning recipes. Obviously I never saw an Apple or IBM or Commodore machine hoisted up on someone's kitchen counter, recipe opened, IRL.
It wasn't always creative or interesting though. Even 40 years ago my friend and I were making fun of endless pictures showing two white people in front of a monitor, with one pointing at it and the other trying to look excitedly at 80-column text or a 4-color pie chart in 320x200 resolution.