A History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads

Tiny Tuba writes "PC World's Harry McCracken pulls together a compendium of vintage PC commercials posted on YouTube. There are commercials from the 1980s right up to the present. If you are looking for a laugh, you will have fun with the Atari 400, Commodore 64 and more." Worth it for the Shattner Vic-20 commercial alone, but the others are well-picked too. Naturally, the Apple 1984 commercial is included.

He missed...

[AKAImBatman]

...the best ad EVER!

Are You Keeping Up With The Commodore? [youtube.com]

I guarantee you'll have that stupid jingle stuck in your head for DAYS! (BWHAHAH!) I even named my most recent blog article [youtube.com] after it. ;)

What no Prime Computer?

[jellomizer]

There was a few comericals for Prime Computer with Dr. Who. I wish I could find a link for them.
Those were some serious adds.

Amiga Commercial

[OakDragon]

Here is one [youtube.com] I had downloaded some time ago from somewhere, and recently put up on YouTube. Featuring: Tommy Lasorda, the Pointer Sisters, Chuck Yeager, and 'Tip' O'Neil!

Americans are not THAT prudish!

[Slithe]

[blockquote]Q: Where are these commercials from?
A: The U.S., as far as I know. Rule one of European computer commercials: They're too dirty for American TV.
[/blockquote]

The commercial [google.com] that they link to is definitely something that could be shown on television. I have seen FAR worse than that. Granted, the U.S. certainly has worse decency laws than Europe (I remember seeing a water-bottle commercial involving a woman swimming naked in a submerged room), but censoring that would just be ridiculous.

Pre-IBM PC was an interesting era.

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the IBM PC, there were quite a few computers that were taken seriously. A lot of things were developing in interesting ways. There was progress. Some of them were good at graphics, some were good at video, some could do decent music, some were actually decent business machines, some had GUIs. Then the IBM PC came along with its bad graphics (a Hercules monochrome card was considered an upgrade) and we got a command line monoculture for the next ten years. Even by 1990, getting AutoCAD and Animator to play nice on the same machine was painful. (If I ever get my hands around the throat of the sadist who invented the PharLap memory manager ...)

It was kind of like the giant foot came down from the sky and squashed Bambi. I wonder how things would have developed if IBM hadn't given us their PC.

Re:Amiga Commercial

[snuf23]

"Yeah, they had a ton of celebrity endorsements for the Amiga back in the day..."

Well by the time Little Richard and the Pointer Sisters got involved it was more like celebrity whore endorsements. I doubt Little Richard ever used an Amiga.

The launch with Andy Warhol creating a portrait of Debbie Harry using a digitizer and an early Amiga art program was pure class though.

I remember being pissed at Commodore for the crap marketing they did on the Amiga in the late '80s. The premium edition of Amiga Forever [amigaforever.com] includes a DVD with a video of Jay Miner (after he left Commodore) at a user group fielding questions about how crap those commercials were. Well worth the money for old Commodore junkies, it includes the "Death Bed Vigil" video of the last day at Commodore US.

I Miss My Commodore 16

[Anonymous Coward]

My parents didn't really know what a computer was, they just knew that my brother and I wanted one. I had dreams of building an intelligent computer that could talk to me like War Games. So, when the flyer came in the mail that we would get a free Commodore 16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_16 [wikipedia.org] if we drove 3 hours south to visit a Time Share resort, I begged and pleaded until we were on the road.

To make a long story short. They had to send us the computer in the mail as they didn't actually have them in stock. So the long drive drive, and Time Share presentation we endured was frustrating in the end... But a few weeks later I was saving my first madlibs program on a tape drive, and truly enjoying life.

This lead me to my first Commodore 64, and then the 128. I made silly games like Box Hunters and Iron Clad that used the amazing sprite animations available on the 128. I thought I was a genius...lol

My God I loved my Commodores. I still do. BBS's.. Ghost Busters, Winter Games, Mission Impossible, Overkill... I could go on, but I bet MANY of you had the same experiences. Times will never be like that again. That feeling of having a keyboard in your hands and thinking that somehow you are going to give your computer AI with the BASIC computer language... The thought of downloading software over your phone line, and playing games with people you couldn't see...

I think I'm going to cry.