When computers were sexy: Hilarious vintage ads from the early days of the PC (LOTS of graphics)

The Daily Mail (U.K.) ^ | April 1, 2012

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Excellent!!!

It sends a thrill down my leg....

[Drew68]

Is that an ashtray on his desk? Wow! This ad must be old!

[JoeProBono]

[Daffynition]

Maybe this is the new future.

3D-printing technology; this came in an email from the MOtley Fool.

[roscommon]

My dad brought home a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1980. We loaded our games with a cassette drive that took an eternity. If somehow you even looked at the wires going from the cassette to the computer it would fail to install properly-very frustrating for a 7 year old who just wanted to play a game.
18 years ago I was with a girlfriend touring the Smithsonian and looked up and saw my dad’s old “trash 80” system on display. It made me smile thinking of all the interesting times I had on that system.

Hard to believe I’m typing this on an iPhone 32 years later...

Roscommon

[fremont_steve]

System Industries was the first place I interviewed with when I was looking to relocate to the “Sand Box,” i.e., Silicon Valley in 1982. I wound up working for a competitor of theirs called “Data Systems Designs.” The real point of the post though is that back then a Moderate GOP member of the house was elected from the Bay Area (the mind boggles at the concept.) His name was Ed Zschau and he founded Systems Industries.

[CrazyIvan]

In ‘93 I took an Autocad course a local college. I think the machine was a 13mhz. You could draw one tooth of a gear and then have the machine do an “array”, draw the other teeth. You could get a cup of coffee while it was doing this!

[lowbridge]

[martin_fierro]

Coffee table made from an original 26-inch hard drive platter from a 1967 Control Data Corporation 6603 Disk File Controller

[Rides_A_Red_Horse]

You could get a cup of coffee while it was doing this!

My unit was a tiny AF activity on an Army Base. We were the forgotten step kids and had antiquated equipment.

I'd go in, turn on the computer, start the coffee. Click on a few options, pour a cup of coffee. Finish the booting up sequence, go out back with my coffee and have a cigarette while Soldiers marched by. I'd smile, wave and think to myself..."Thank you God for steering me into the Air Force because that looks like it sucks!"

[y6162]

“White water Prodigy boards?”

I logged onto prodify a few times, but by that time I was regular on compuserve. From compuserve, I went to AOL.

All pay services. Imagine that?

[sima_yi]

Apple II. Not a II+, not a IIe. Came with 4K RAM. Upgraded it to a whopping 32K. Its video output device was a Sony Trinitron. The mass storage device was a tape deck (like a Walkman). I would program that thing for hours at a stretch.

We used to have competition to see who could make it do the most interesting display with only one line of (BASIC) code. Those were the days.

[IronJack]

My first machine was an Apple IIc. I was one of probably five people in the world who bought one. It came with a blazing 1.77 MHz Motorola 65C02 microprocessor, two 64K “bank-switched” RAM boards, a green monochrome monitor and a built-in 5 1/4” floppy drive. The OS (ProDOS) had to be loaded from a system disk every time the machine started and it had a built-in BASIC interpreter coded onto the ROM (the “Monitor ROM”). I still have the machine and all the peripherals, including AppleWorks, Apple’s integrated spreadsheet, database, and word processor.

[ken in texas]

I held out for the amazing 286 processor, and paid $370 for a Seagate 40MB hard drive plus an extra $96 for the MFM hard drive controller. The truly adventerous would try the drive with a RLL controller -- if all worked well you could get 60MB out of the 40MB drive.

Those were some fun days, but it could sure get expensive.

[bcsco]

You go back before me then.

Not necessarily. I think the 8088 processors were out when I bought my 8086. Its real value was the education in MSDOS.

[RightOnline]

"My first computer was an XT with an 8088 processor, 4.77 MHz, 640K ram, no hard drive, two floppy drives, and a dazzling 4-color display monitor (including white)."

Show-off. Mine had metal rods and colored beads....called an "aba-something"......

[Telepathic Intruder]

I'm reeling in the memories. I bought the 286 right after my 8088. I couldn't believe how wonderful it was to have a hard drive and a real color monitor. My old one had 4 colors, this one had 4,096 (16 shades of RBG). I would just stare at the screen sometimes. Then came my lightning fast 20 Mhz 396. Then my Pentium 90. None of them would last very long.

[catfish1957]

In 1986 I paid $2300 of IBM XT Clone. It had 640K RAM, a 32 Mb HD, and a CGA monitor, which had a wonderous three colors to it.

Sucker had a turbo charge button on it toio, which tooking it to a blazing 7 mhz processor speed.

Windows?, what was that? Back then DOS was our friend.

[Erasmus]

Which model of CoCo?

The last ones could go up to 512K and could support OS9 Level II, using a memory control device called a “GIME” chip. It would have been slightly more capable if Tandy had used Motorola’s 6829 memory mapping chip.

I had a couple different CoCos, including one marketed through Tandy. I did get OS9 level II running on it.

I have a couple of connections to those HW and SW products.

People are still supporting the CoCo, with advanced video and storage add-ons. There’s a couple of annual meetings of CoCo partisans, one of them near Chicago.