When Computers Were Young — Ads From The Early Days Of Microcomputers

By Tuesday June 19, 2007


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Yup. A notebook that can run at either a blistering 9.54 or more sedate 4.77 MHz. Why would you ever need anything faster? For more, check out Computerworlds’ article on some of their old ads.



23 Comments
  1. bobbo says:
    6/19/2007 at 4:11 am

    I sometimes marvel at my folks being born before man could fly and live to see man walk on the moon.

    But then, I witnessed the birth and maturing of computers and the internets.

    Its still irks me that it wasn’t until I got my first computer at work
    (1980 or so?) that I woke up to their “presence.” All those crappy, didn’t work, who cares computers that I ran into before that didn’t spark any interest. That Bill Gates guy did have a period of insight.

  2. Mac Guy says:
    6/19/2007 at 4:33 am

    I especially love the analog coupler!

  3. TheGlobalWarmer says:
    6/19/2007 at 4:59 am

    I’ve used acoustic couplers and actually used a NEC MultiSpeed at work. Gawd I’m feeling ancient….

  4. Mark Derail says:
    6/19/2007 at 5:04 am

    Wordstar was my first love in word processing.
    Ctrl + P
    Ctrl + S

  5. RTaylor says:
    6/19/2007 at 5:22 am

    I’m sure many of us had experience with this old gear. What I want to know if any of us had any experience with Elvira. 🙂

  6. Pfkad says:
    6/19/2007 at 5:31 am

    #5: Yeah, I remember a time when I thought Elvira was hot, too. But I was using an Amiga at the time. They both seem kind of dated now.

  7. Frank says:
    6/19/2007 at 5:53 am

    I like how the NEC “does windows”…perhaps it is the other way around…LOL

  8. mark says:
    6/19/2007 at 6:05 am

    Does anyone here remember Durango Computer Corp? It was a neat computer combining keyboard, backplane, expansion slots, disk drives, dot amtrix printer (fast) and a 10 in. monochrome screen. Ran CPM OS? Probably not.

  9. Lauren the Ghoti says:
    6/19/2007 at 6:53 am

    Computers come and computers go, but boooobs never go obsolete.

  10. Nicky says:
    6/19/2007 at 7:12 am

    these ads are like from the stone age of computer advertising

  11. T-Rick says:
    6/19/2007 at 7:13 am

    Is that Stephen Colbert in the NEC Ad? 🙂

  12. rax says:
    6/19/2007 at 7:57 am

    That Digi-Log *thing* looks like the nuclear football.

  13. Angel H. Wong says:
    6/19/2007 at 9:10 am

    I once worked on a 8088 machine, I feel so old…

  14. Peter Rodwell says:
    6/19/2007 at 10:19 am

    My first computer (c. 1978) came as a load of components in plastic bags. I spent endless hours soldering and – incredibly – it worked first time. But I would have killed for a sleek, modern system like the MicroPro or even a Commodore PET.

  15. Docred says:
    6/19/2007 at 10:35 am

    I collect old machines (mostly the old 8-bit systems) as a hobby….I’ve got quite a number of different systems set up or packed away, and it never ceases to amaze me what we worked with in the ’70s and ’80s, and did amazing things with. C64 with 64k of ram (but perhaps only about 40k available after the os loaded), no internet (bbs’s were fun though). Or the old Apple II which I think shipped with either 16 or 48k standard…but we played games, published books, controlled factories/security systems, communicated….we do it a bit more easily and with more ‘window’ dressing than before, and in greater numbers but those machines are what our contemporary tech is built on. I had a lot of fun…guess thats why I collect them now 🙂

  16. Omar Egan says:
    6/19/2007 at 2:13 pm

    Three out of the four ads use the same font… they’re either from the same ad agency or they really liked that font!

  17. mark says:
    6/19/2007 at 3:31 pm

    16. Is there a national museum devoted to this stuff? If not there should be. Can you imagine taking your wife / family into that museum? Sounds like you may have some artifacts there. Remember Shugart drives? And magnetic card ledger computers? All data was stored on the index cards with a magnetic stripe down the side, made by Philips Computer.

  18. Jägermeister says:
    6/19/2007 at 4:02 pm

    Just imagine the nostalgia our children will go through in 30 years from now when the computer output is holographic… I can’t believe we actually stared at screens back then… 🙂

  19. Mr. Fusion says:
    6/19/2007 at 7:54 pm

    A notebook that can run at either a blistering 9.54 or more sedate 4.77 MHz. Why would you ever need anything faster?

    Simple answer. Because they weren’t running windows and all the crap we see today. I remember running a 286 clone with WORDPERFECT, Lotus 123, and some statistical programs and never thinking this is slow. I think it all sat on DOS 5.0. Those old dot matrix printers were though. That would have been about 20 years ago too.

  20. Mr. Fusion says:
    6/19/2007 at 7:56 pm

    #19, I keep telling myself that when my kid graduates from college, she will be telling people how computers use to “crash” and get the BSOD when she was in diapers.

  21. John Paradox says:
    6/19/2007 at 8:20 pm

    Is there a national museum devoted to this stuff?

    Yeah, there’s the Computer History Museum, who have a way to donate equipment.
    (I wonder if they’d take my five or six Coco’s?)

    J/P=?

  22. tallwookie says:
    6/20/2007 at 9:17 am

    wow! those are oldskool


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