Silly Old PC Ads

By  |  Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 11:26 pm

Yesterday, I visited 410 Townsend, a building in San Francisco’s SOMA district, and was startled to discover that its lobby is festooned with large framed computer advertisements–really old. amusing ones from the 1980s. The building is home to a bevy of tech-related companies: Sony, Playdom, TechCrunch, Yammer, and others. I don’t know whether one of them put these up, or if they’re part of the landlord’s decor, but I loved them…and I snapped bad iPhone photos of three of them to share with you, including a sort of proto-“Think Different” ad in which Ben Franklin endorses the Apple II, a TRS-80 ad with Issac Asimov, and one for Atari’s Stacy (a portable computer that took 12 C cells and drained them in 15 minutes).

They’re after the jump for your enjoyment.


 
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  1. Piers Corfield Says:
    February 18th, 2011 at 11:00 am

    Back in August 2001 I wrote an article marking the 20th anniversary of the personal computer (https://sites.google.com/site/pierscorfield/published-articles-1/marking-two-decades-of-the-personal-computer) which, another 10 years on, just goes to show what an astonishing impact the PC has had on the world.

  2. Kevin Says:
    February 21st, 2011 at 5:56 am

    I saw a Yahoo ad in that area myself. Not quite in the same era, I know but it felt nostalgic.

  3. dholyer Says:
    February 23rd, 2011 at 3:27 am

    When I was an Atari user, I recall hearing of Stacy, but never saw any pics or even an ad. How much you think the track ball controller was more aimed at the gaming world than the music world. So did they upgrade the ANTIC sound from 4 8 bit sound ports to 16 bit, maybe 8 or 16 sound channels, this so Atari could stay a jump ahead of the Apple improvements. The other thing was the ANTIC chip controled the Universial Serial Channel that the Disk drives 4 port RS-232 serial box, and even the audio tape recorder for data storage used.

    It's Midi stuff used the 4 joystick or 8 eight bit I/O chips.

    In ways you may say Atari was the first to use something like a USB port some 20 years ahead of it's time.

    I wonder what an Atari ST laptop would have looked like?, But Stacy still looked sexy for those days and time.