10) Cheap memory?
The bad old days of expensive memory may be in the distant past, but this old magazine advertisement from the early 1980s still manages to give us the price heebie jeebies. In those days, everybody was convinced that bytes and bits were plenty. We can still remember when a terrabyte hard disk cost over $1000 and that wasn't very long ago when we think about it.
Back in the days of this ad (early 80s), $20,000 could actually buy you a nice house in Australia.
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| Image credit: Computerworld |
What this image is really telling us:
That people shouldn't whinge about the current price of flash drives. Trust us, it could be worse. Much worse.
9) Early word processors
Way back in the day when people were forced to bang their brains over a typewriter to write a letter - computers offered the first instance of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Early PC word processors offered a ribbon-less future where deleting mistakes became as quick and easy as pressing the backspace key.
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| Image credit: Computerworld |
What this image is really telling us:
We should be really thankful for the modern text editor.
8) Video phones
Ahh, video phones - the fashionable Jetson-like technology that has still never taken off. Way back in the early 70s, US based Western Electric thought everybody was going to get a kick out of looking at the people they speak to on the phone. Their 'picturephone' was more sci-fi than reality though.
Almost 40 years later and we're still wondering what all the fuss is about, even while 3G and VOIP technologies attempt to convince us that looking at the person on the other line is a wholly sane idea.
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| Image credit: Womansday.com |
What this image is really telling us:
Monitor + phone = future internet.
7) Asimov loves Radio Shack
Celebrated science fiction author (and scientist) Isaac Asimov seemed to be hungry for a quick endorsement dollar when he took on the task of promoting the TRS-80. Either that, or he just plain loved it. Originally released in 1977, the early models were said to be prone to RF interference problems. But later models caught on a big way.
This ad, from 1982, came at a time when the computer was at its most popular - competing with the likes of Apple and Commodore PC. Early model TRS-80 machines shipped with a whopping 4Kb of RAM and a 1.77Mhz processor. Now if only Stephen Hawking would would endorse something.
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| Img source: RadioShack/Flickr |
What this image is really telling us:
We can only imagine how one of those pesky iRobots (from Asimov's story) would have behaved with a TRS-80 running it.
6) Email...what the heck is email?
It's easy to dismiss this ad as something from an overly ambitious marketing meeting - except there was a time when email was a far spookier, distant technology from the ethereal cosmos. Not that things have changed completely since then. Take the scare tactics over spam for example: junk mail (and the associated malware) can infect your computer and wreak havoc over your personal files.
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| Image credit: Honeywell |
What this image is really telling us:
Email is evil. Who ya gonna call?
Next page: The top 5 retro tech ads of all time