Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Vintage Computer Ads - We've Come A Long Way, Baby!

I had a dear old friend visit over the weekend and we were reminiscing about how much our lives have changed over the years. Everything from our marital status, to our careers to our children have changed - and so has the technology we use everyday.

Back in the late 1980's I was a partner in an advertising company (Cusick & Klender Advertising) that did national radio and print campaigns. As part of our marketing schtick we created these characters called "The Admen."

These quasi-fictional characters were (in our minds) a perfect vehicle to use to demonstrate our advertising prowess by promoting our services via a demo that featured our Admen alter-egos. Long story short - we produced a demo reel with commercials we had written - intermixed with an "interview" with "those wild and crazy Admen...".

Awwwwkward...

On the "B" side we re-wrote the lyrics to popular songs of the day ("Stray Cat Strut", "The Piano Man") and included a couple of songs we wrote just for the promotion. We had them all pressed and mailed them out - on CASSETTE tapes.

Yep. Cassette tapes.

A couple of years ago I came across a few copies (still in the shrink-wrap!) and gave one to my friend. Although I think I still have one of the only "cassette players" still in existence - he managed to find one, hook it up to his Mac with some who-knows-how-he-got-it cable and ripped down the entire cassette to a CD.

It was when he said "... well, I was thinking about it - and if I didn't transfer it to digital it might have been lost forever - because who in the hell still has a cassette player?" - that I had finally realized I was getting old. I also realized that technology had changed faster in reality than in my perception (or my feeble memory).

In fact, it's changed so much, that I wanted to take a look back at some of the cutting edge ads for "bleeding edge" technology at the time. So I hopped on the "new" interweb and found a bunch of older (actual!) advertisements from days gone by.

I hope you enjoy theses as much as I do:






















P.S. Thanks, Ed for the CD!


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