A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration
Gather the kids round your Apple II and enjoy these nostalgic, vaguely unsettling vintage ads.Posted by Benj Edwards | Sunday, November 22, 2009
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Computers: The Heart of the 1980s Home
Familiar holiday tales tell of a time in the late 19th century when loving families would gather around the hearth to give thanks for their many blessings, sing songs, read Dickens, and roast chestnuts. But by the early 1980s — if you believed computer ads of the day — the home computer had become the center of the traditional nuclear family. Chestnuts were replaced by joysticks and computer manuals.
With the holidays just around the corner, let’s carefully peel back the fabric of time and examine ten vintage advertisements from a more civilized age when dazed, zombified android families found themselves irresistibly drawn to home PCs.
As you look through these ads, keep this in mind: When was the last time more than two people sat around your computer?
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When Families Were Thankful for the Blessing of Computing | Technologizer Says:
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:49 pm[…] View 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration slideshow. […]
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A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration | Technologizer | Damn Right Straight Says:
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:58 am[…] the original post here: A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration | Technologizer Share and […]
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Retro '80s Family Computer Advertising | BFG Blog Says:
November 24th, 2009 at 1:04 pm[…] Technologizer brings us this fun little stroll down Nostalgia Lane: a collection of family home computer ads complete with large blocks of Ogilvie-esque copy and reasoned arguments for purchasing the product. (Remember back in the day when people actually read copy? Well, at least that’s what we told ourselves.) addthis_pub = 'bfginteractive'; addthis_brand = 'BFG'; addthis_options = 'email, digg, delicious, google, facebook, live, myspace, reddit,stumbleupon, twitter, more'; […]
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Tune Up Your PC » Post Topic » Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in the U.S.! Says:
November 26th, 2009 at 8:46 pm[…] something lighthearted for the holiday: A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration. “Gather the kids round your Apple II and enjoy these nostalgic, vaguely unsettling vintage […]
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Five Great Vintage Ads for Father’s Day Says:
June 20th, 2010 at 6:40 am[…] Source: https://www.technologizer.com/2009/11/22/a-1980s-home-computer-family-celebration/2/. […]
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:43 am
Hate to say it, but these ads to point to some significant issues with modern technology ads… type-setting. These ads, especially the “How to get from Sesame St. to Wall St.” all have fantastic use of fonts, spacing, copywriting, and placement… something that you rarely see if you were to flip through a modern technology magazine, where ads are more or less modern replications of “Boys Life X-Ray Glasses.”
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
I don’t think so, Mike. With the exception of “How to Get From Sesame St. to Wall St.” (which I really, really like), I think the type-setting is awful, even compared to some modern-day tech ads.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I remember these ads…I started with a Vic20, then moved to a C=64. I had friends with TRS-80s, CoCo’s and Apples. I got Compute! and Compute!s Gazette and spent hours punching in machine code, only after creating the machine code editor that preceded the code in the issues. Truly fun times.
Back then in school, it was awesome to submit a book report or essay that had been printed in NLQ on a dot matrix (or daisy wheel) printer attached to your home computer. How many parents bought their kids those machines with such a scenario in mind? And how many of those kids wound up playing games and using cracking programs to make copies of games? And what of one’s first experiences with modems and BBS?
They were heady times, full of promise for the future. The competition in the industry led to amazing innovations and creativity.
Comments about fonts and typesetting aside, does anyone really think that the current crop of “Hi, I’m a Mac”…”I’m a PC” are really any better than those ads of the 1980s?
I’d say that in terms of marketing creativity, we’ve gone backwards compared to those older advertising efforts.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:40 am
My experience was a lot like Ricks starting with the VIC-20.
Wonderful machine because it used color!
I belonged to clubs where we would meet at a different members home every week or so.
Learning to program in Basic was a blast when you would get on a friends ‘puter’ & type in a memorized program that when you typed ‘Run’ & hit enter the friends name would flash on the screen in colors that would change every few seconds. My buddies would be ‘Amazed’ if they hadn’t learned Basic yet.
Real ‘Heady’ times back then, specially when the Web started being available to us ‘ordinary’ guys & Email became fashionable!!!
November 26th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
It was the C64 versus the Apple ][ for me. The c64 had some sweet games, but it was the basic programming of the apple that got me hooked. The old apple ||c might still be in the parents garage – might have to take a look next time I am there.
Maybe it was the advertisements like this that made me go with the apple.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
These ads are so unreal. You never used your computer like that with your parents standing there smiling at you.
Using the computer is by it’s nature a solitary activity.
And I do thing the modern mac vs. PC ads are better, because they are funny.
November 30th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Forget the computers…. I can’t get over the outfits here. Ah, the days when mom had a severe perm and used to wear horrid plaid dresses with football shoulder pads.
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I don’t see what is so “vaguely disturbing” about these ads. They don’t seem any more or less strange than printed ads for other consumer products in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Weird to me, is an ad claiming that a carton for luck strikes under the tree is an unbeatable Christmas gift.
January 2nd, 2010 at 9:03 am
Hi,
Awesome post,just found this post from my Yahoo Buzz upcomming blogpost news feed, really interesting post, keep it up.
Michael
March 24th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Cool ad. Really portrays the 1980 lifestyle. And look how old the computer looks like.
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