this is beyond funny - Doral

froggy

cum....pyooo...ter? what this is?

BiZarRroBALlmeR

Sweet, they even have my first computer - the Osborne. Man what a beast that thing was at 25 pounds of portability.

Things have definitely changed (looks at iphone, shakes head in disbelief).

Also, I used to think those HP ads with animals made out of resistors etc were pretty amazing as sculptures.

HeyBeav

I like Atari's warning... We should all fear those Mutants...

drkllpnt

I had a Commodore Vic 20. I used to spend an hour at programming to make a cheap bird flap across the screen and make the screen flash different colors. I remember thinking, "Wow, computers can't get any better than this!".

Forrestgumby

My first was personal computer was an old Apple IIe. When it came out, it was SO cutting edge. I kept it in a closet for years and actually sold it to a neighnor kid a couple of years ago for $20, and as far as I know, he is still using it to type his homework on.

Curves

I had a TI! It was great!

UniComp

@Forrestgumby: Actually, they probably never will get better than that.

SinAmos

Cosby is a god, but he still looks creepy in this ad.

SinAmos

Wow, this is even better than the saved pictures of websites from the 90's.

gamecrazychris

What's that big box behind the Ti? I had a Ti99/4a, and the keyboard itself was the computer.

Elliuotatar

Um... no pictures visible? What am I missing?

infmom

My neighbor when I was growing up had one of those Ti's!

Noobs-R-Us

C-64 with a 300 baud modem, with which I could download ASCII pics of naked ladies...squint and you can see a nipple!

mdoublej

Cosby put his cards into the wrong company...

StopTheLHC

No Tandy? Ridiculous.

rrrrrrright

Dude, they need to bring back Computerland.

NagChampa

@infmom: Click through to Boing Boing

bucho54

(Takes deep breath, readying myself for the admission.)

My first computer was a Coleco ADAM. There, I said it.

Zoidbert

Aw a TI99/4A. That was my first, too. Though the actual one I used has long since disappeared, a few years ago I got another one through the magic of eBay.
@Elliuotatar:
That was the "Peripheral Expansion System"--a box that had a 5 1/4" floppy drive and slots for upgrade cards (memory, etc).

mikejonas

WTF? The Apple ad says that they invented the personal computer. That's quite the statement.

2-7offsuit

I love the style of advertising. All those words. Making things look space age. So funny.

pobox90210

Funny how apple claims to have invented the Personal Computer ie PC yet dont call their Macs PCs.

Aturayd

... oh, nevermind.... adblock was a little too aggressive!

infmom

@bucho54: I did click through. It says "8 megabytes of JPEGs after the jump" but I see nowhere to jump.

Even put my glasses on to be sure. :)

infmom

I feel really young, my first pc wasn't until Windows 95!

gamecrazychris

ZX Spectrum 128k ... i still have nightmares about bad tapes....

boi_PT

ZX Spectrum (got to love the rubber keys), Commodore 64, and a BBC micro. I can't remember which came first but I do remember playing with all three. The loading times of cassette tapes was a bitch though.

BoardStupid

I have three thoughts about this.

First, a friend of mine was jealous of a refurbished iBook G4 I'd just bought because his wife had forbidden him from buying any new computers. So I bought a circa-1993 Powerbook 180 through eBay ($30 shipped) that still worked and left it on his desk. The grin on his face was worth it.

Second, back in high school art class our teacher would have us look through a decades-old collection of National Geographics for subject matter (what I later discovered to have been sort-of copyright infringement). One of the most amazing things about the magazines, besides the photography, were the old ads for things like computers and cars. You'd see these products that to me were old and worn out advertised as the top-of-the-line technology. Just so odd.

Finally, my first real newspaper job (4 years ago) had me working at a newspaper I shall not name where all the reporters composed their stories on Micro-Tek terminals, which were 20 or so years old at the time, while I was 19.

LoganAdams

I had an AT&T computer....I remember the deathstar logo on it...16 colors too.....

Y2KGTP

@Y2KGTP: Hells yes. We had one too. And it had Microsoft Windows before it was an OS, and more like MS Works--a suite of mostly useless applications. It had a bare bones word processor, paint, a few games, and a bunch of stuff we never used.

Oh, and that AT&T also had Word Perfect 2.0. I remember being floored when we switched to a color monitor that seemed to display in either RGB or CYM, depending on the program.

SF_iris

I would say Apple did pretty much invent the personal computer. There were only a couple computers before it targeted at the home, and they were only available as expensive kits, and were really hard to do anything at all with. With the Apple I (though sold as a kit) they made it a LOT more friendly than anything before it - you could use it with a standard TV, it was designed specifically for use with keyboard and screen (those were expensive luxuries on computers like the Altair), and it was pretty affordable at the time (for a computer). And with the Apple 2, it came prepackaged in a nice friendly case all put together, and came with BASIC, so you could program it out of the box.

Dreamwriter

The most important thing to take away from this particular add is the Cosby sweater phenom. I will try to explain it, in vain to my children, and then I will show them this.

"It's a Cosby sweater, a COSSSBY sweater!"

Jackson the Narcisisst

@Zoidbert: Me too! My father got me a Coleco Adam when I was 13, back in 1985. I used it for Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom and word processing (the game was boring and that daisy wheel printer was noisy and slow!). It lasted a few months before the printer died, and that was that, because the printer supplied power to the rest of the system, so I was left with a huge expensive paperweight. I got a Commodore-64 a year later and never looked back. That Adam was a POS.

Barion

Yeesh, I was born in 85, the only computer on this list I actually used was an Apple IIe we had at my elementary school. Played Oregon Trail among some other education games. At home we had a Mac 128k that I played with endlessly, mainly just using the paint program and playing a few games.

I always hated the look of these old computer ads though... well I guess I don't like magazine ads much at all to begin with anyway. Does make you think though-- nary a person that doesn't even own a cell-phone that easily out-paces any of those computers in computing and memory.

Absent Blue

I had the sweet ass Timex sinclair with the 3" square optional 16k of memory. Smaller, lighter, and cheaper that the eee 20 years ago!

fastm3driver

@Jackson the Narcisisst:
Nice High Fidelity quote, beat me to it.

secretmanofagent

my grand parents owned a string of radio shacks back in the 70s/80s

man i thought that was some cool shit back then

maybe it's cooler now?

i still have my comic collection from about 76 on, there are tons of great ads in there for computers and various games, how did we ever get excited over such basic simple garbage?

tegronin

Who should I buy a computer from...Cosby surely knows his bits from bytes...but King Kong Bundy might avalanche me and pin me for a 5 count...decision...decisions

Stabio

I had a Timex Sinclair too, until the cassette tape drive was so unreliable I didn't feel anything I programmed into it would ever save. Then came the Atari 2600 where I played Defender for 12 hours straight when I was sick with Mono. Then the 4.77mhz CPU, a real PC when Starflight was the game to play, and it was probably the most fun I ever had, with it's sequel Starflight 2, oh those were the golden age.

New games are better, but I don't think they are any more fun than the ones we had years ago.

Nick_Bentley

@Elliuotatar: The peripheperal expansion box... for music synth cards and floppy drives (!!!)... I had that exact setup. Loved it!

keh

@LoganAdams: Dude, you worked at my newspaper? When I started there in 2000 they were working on the same systems that I'd played with at computer camp in 1987. That damn Dewers system had to go!

GeekyNerdGuy

I had a 286 AT&T. I put together this AI program that tried to determine the weather and time of day by asking the user questions. I packed it up and took it to the science fair. It never turned back on.

My teacher was like, F+

GeekyNerdGuy

Oh yeah, and my first machine was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III and my dad modded a Radio Shack walkie talkie into a speaker for Scarfman and Moon Rover.

GeekyNerdGuy

Psh they don't have my personal first computer... 17 Inch MacBook Pro... What the hell man??

leopard6789

@rrrrrrright: If you scroll down enough, you'll see an ad for a TRS-80.
Our first family computer was a TI, too, although my dad had a Heathkit H8
Heathkit ads

HEY HEY HEY... NOW I WANT A 386!!!

The first computer I ever touched was an iMac G3, I didn't know how good I had it back then since I was eight, my elementary school only had Macs for student use! Now that I'm in high school I get frustrated because we have to use slow dells donated by Michael Dell.....

The first computer I ever touched was an iMac G3, Back then I didn't know about apple or Microsoft (I was like 8) but I did know that I liked the colors! Best memory ever.....