Gallery of Past Tech (and Other) Advertising

theodp writes "The Vintage Ad Browser takes you back to the days when Google conjured up images of Barney Google (1948). When the hip music player was a Walkman (1982). When Osborne meant state-of-the-art in computing (1982). When Big Picture TV meant 12" (1948). When compact camera referred to a Pocket Instamatic (1972). And when wireless meant getting phone calls 300 feet from the house (1982)."

If only people did what the ad told them to do...

[LostCluster]

I have a personal favorite for an ad that makes no sense today and has to make you wondering what the people back then were thinking. I give you.... The Ode to Why [lmgtfy.com].

You can't read the ads, just buy them

[Gadget_Guy]

How useless. I went to the site, found an ad that seemed interesting and clicked on it. Nothing. No, I couldn't zoom in to be able to read the text. The only link is to ebay so I can buy it from the site owner. This is just one big stupid catalog of ebay sales.

I am just about to put up some stuff on ebay to sell - I must remember to post the "story" here.

Re:If only people did what the ad told them to do.

[Entropy98]

Enron was thinking "I hope this makes people buy our stock!"

From what I remember a lot of the ads from the dot-com bubble era would leave you scratching your head wondering what the company was selling, I guess its obvious now, soon to be worthless stock.

Picture a computer under $1,000 that can Run 1-2-3

[theodp]

Circa-1984 IBM PCjr [vintageadbrowser.com]

Re:On your marks, get slashdotted, go!

[j_philipp]

As the creator of the site, I'm hoping for the best :) For what it's worth, I'm using Amazon S3 for the storage of the images (which needs to be paid by bandwidth, admittedly, so I'll have to watch my costs closely), and due to caching there should be no database connections on any ad page once it has been viewed for a first time (unless I iterate the version of the site or clear the cache... never before searched queries do cause database connections, naturally). But none of this guarantess uptime during slashdotting... again I can just hope for the best!

Re:You can't read the ads, just buy them

[phantomfive]

I don't know, some of it is pretty cool. When I saw this one [vintageadbrowser.com], I was reminded that once RCA was a pretty cool company.

Note to self: if you ever own a failing technology company, it's better to close up and try again than sell out.

Re:You can't read the ads, just buy them

[phantomfive]

I'd like to expand on that: I had an RCA VCR from 1988 that didn't give out until 2005, and that with fairly regular use. Its replacement didn't last three years. Sometimes when they say, "They don't make things like they used to" they are right, although the old VCR did cost a bit more.

Re:You can't read the ads, just buy them

[Warphammer]

RCA was also bizarrely good at dropping the ball on technologies they had. RCA's Lancaster, PA plant made picture and TV camera tubes. My dad told me they had engineers come to the local ham radio club in the 70's and show off this tiny (for the time) CCD-based video camera they'd come up with, showing how it could take pictures by candlelight. If they'd commercialized that quickly, they could have extended their dominance of the TV station camera market into the 80's. The same plant was also home to the research group that commercialized the heat pipe concept, which was discarded by them, then bought out by the engineers involved and turned into a company that's still going today. They even had a very workable VCR prototype in the early-mid 70's that they dropped as 'too expensive' rather than try to develop into something affordable. That decision alone, if they'd controlled the US videotape format, could've let us have RCA around as a real company today.

Missing: Hopper's Univac Stand-Ins + ENIAC

[DynaSoar]

Not among them is an ad for Univac which Grace Hopper told a story about. When the photo for the ad was to be taken, two guys in lab coats were brought in, the women who ran the machine were ushered out, and the photo taken with the two stand-ins. Went looking, but couldn't find it.

What I did find was something even more galling. The original ENIAC programming crew was six women. After its introduction the engineers, managers and even sales people (all men) became well known. The programmers were ignored. 40 years later Kathy Kleiman, a programmer herself who had been learning about the ENIAC team, was told that the women appearing in the photos were 'refrigerator ladies', models hired to stand in front of the machines. Having interviewed the ENIAC programmers still alive, she knew them to be women on the team. She and the remaining ENIAC prorasmmer4s are trying to raise money to produce a documentary on the subject: http://eniacprogrammers.org/ [eniacprogrammers.org]