Alternate titles for this ad: 150 Receding Hairlines! 150 Giant Foreheads!

Click the ad to see it at full size.

Here’s the text of the ad:

150 Extra Engineers

An IBM Electronic Calculator speeds through thousands of intricate computations so quickly that on many complex problems it’s like having 150 EXTRA Engineers.

No longer must valuable engineering personnel…now in critical shortage…spend priceless creative time at routine repetitive figuring.

Thousands of IBM Electronic Business Machines…vital to our nation’s defense…are at work for science, industry and the armed forces, in laboratories, factories and offices, helping to meet urgent demands for greater production.

Photo courtesy of “SirMildredPierce”.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

I’m sure that this beast of a hard drive is now dwarfed by the USB keys that they give away as swag at tech conferences.

Click the ad to see it at full size.

From roughly the same time as the Honeywell “What the Heck is Electronic Mail?” advertisement I showed you earlier, comes this Apple ad for the original Apple ][ computer. You have to remember that this was a time when most people didn’t have a computer at their desk; in fact, if an office had a computer, it had just one. And the desktop computers of that era had far less processor power (they typically has 1 MHz 8-bit chips like the Z80 or 6502) and RAM (maximum address space was 64K; machines typically maxed out at 48K RAM) than even the cheapest of today’s mobile phones. And yes, that’s a standard TV set being used as a monitor – its highest resolution was 280 by 192 pixels.

The tricky part about creating such an ad is trying to convince people of that era that they needed a computer. Remember, in those days computers were relegated to their own rooms, the fax machine was still new, mobile phones were toys for the rich and were carried in their own briefcases and when office and even legal documents were typed or written out in longhand. I’ve been trying to think of a present-day analogue for a late 1970s/early 1980s computer ad, but I’m drawing a blank.

Here’s the text of the ad:

What kind of man owns his own computer?

Rather revolutionary, the whole idea of owning your own computer? Not if you’re a diplomat, printer, scientist, inventor…or a kite designer, too. Today there’s Apple Computer. It’s designed to be a personal computer. To uncomplicate your life. And make you more effective.

It’s a wise man who owns an Apple.

If your time means money, Apple can help you make more of it. In an age of specialists, the most successful specialists stay away from uncreative drudgery. That’s where Apple comes in.

Apple is a real computer, right to the core. So just like big computers, it manages data, crunches numbers and prints reports. You concentrate on what you do best. And let Apple do the rest. Apple makes that easy with three programming languages – including Pascal – that let you be your own software expert.

Apple, the computer worth not waiting for

Time waiting for access to your company’s big mainframe is time wasted. What you need in your department – on yourdesk – is a computer that answers only to you…Apple Computer. It’s less expensive than timesharing. More dependable than distributed processing. Far more flexible than centralized EDP. And, at less than $2500 (as shown), downright affordable.

Visit your local computer store

You can join the personal computer revolution by visiting the Apple dealer in your neighborhood. We’ll give you his name when you call our toll-free number…

This ad won’t make any sense if you’re not a follower of the TV series Lost. However, if you are, you’ll find it amusing…

Click the ad to see the original on its Flickr page.

Tim Hildred of LinuxCaffe writes:

We have in our storage space a veritable heap of donated pre-loved electronics, some of which we hope to recycle and repurpose, some of which is probably junk. What we need as a small team of people who, in exchange for coffee and snacks, will help us sort it out.  There will probably be some spoils as well, as those who help should be able to help themselves to some things. So, bring your friends, help us make our heap into something workable, help the community to thrive, and help your blood-caffiene levels to remain stable. We’ll love you for ever.

The sorting will take place in two shifts:

• Tomorrow, Saturday March 21st, from 12:00 noon-ish until 4:00 p.m.-ish
• Wednesday, March 25th, from 5 p.m.-ish until 9:00 p.m.-ish.

If you’ve got a technical bent, some free time and community spirit, come on down to LinuxCaffe and give them a hand sorting through their donated electronics!

Update

I’m giving the machine to HacklabTO, who were the first to contact me about it. Congrats, guys!

It’s been sitting in my basement long enough, and it’s time that it found a good home. By “it”, I’m referring to my deadbeat ex-housemate’s Symbolics XL1200 Lisp Machine (pictured on the right), a big hulking piece of computer industry history. If you want it and can either pick it up from me (I’m in the High Park area of Accordion City) or can make arrangements to have it shipped to you, it’s yours, FREE. And yes, by free, I mean “free as in beer”. Zero dollars. Gratis.

The full story of how I came to possess this machine is written up in a blog entry of mine from January 2007. As stated in that story, the machine, when last turned on, displayed the message “Hardware Error” and wouldn’t boot any further. As I wrote nearly two years ago:

The fact that it displays a diagnostic message suggests that all is not lost; if someone were willing to go over its numerous circuit boards with a logic probe, he or she may be able to diagnose and fix the problem. Alternately, someone out there who already owns an XL1200 could use it as a source for replacement parts.

It sat safely in a closet in my old house for three years and it’s been sitting in the storage locker of my condo for the past 18 months. It is in good condition, and aside from being put into the storage locker when I moved to the condo, it hasn’t been touched.

If you’re a hardware hacker, computer historian or just really, really, really like the Lisp programming language and want serious Lisp bragging rights, this machine can be yours for free if you can take it off my hands. Interested parties should contact me at joey@globalnerdy.com.

Links

• My article about the Lisp Machine’s being for sale from January 2007. Remember, it’s no longer for sale; I’m giving it away!
• Symbolics site. “Symbolics.com” is widely regarded to be the first .com domain name.
• Symbolics Lisp Machine Documents. If you get the machine, you might want these.
• Wikipedia entry for Symbolics. Thanks to their kerfuffle with Richard Stallman, the article credits Symbolics with playing “a key, if adversarial role” in started the Free Software Movement.
• Symbolics Museum. An online collection of pictures and stories about Symbolics.
• Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum. Another collection of pictures and stories about Symbolics Lisp Machines.
• Lisp Machine Information and Supplies. Peter Paine’s repository of Lisp Machine infromation.
•   Wikipedia entry for the Lisp Programming language.

Found these photos while digging through my archives on the backup hard drive and thought you folks might find them interesting. They’re flipchart pages from either June 2000, back when I was working at Cory Doctorow’s startup, OpenCola. These are notes that I wrote on the GNUtella protocol; Chris Cummer and I worked off these notes to produce an app called COLAvision, which scored Gnutellanet for audio and video files, captured them and cued them up to be served as streams (oh, the assignments we got during the bubble…).

I expect to be doing a fair bit of doodling, since the b5media tech office walls are largely floor-to-ceiling whiteboards and I’ve also been diving into Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, a book on solving problems and selling ideas with hand-drawn pictures on whiteboards, flipcharts, notepads, scrap paper or even — as the title implies — the back of a napkin (or serviette to you Brits out there).

My notes on the GNUtella protocol, part 1.

My notes on the GNUtella protocol, part 2.

Inspired by my earlier post on the Accordion Guy blog titled The Way Movies Were in the Seventies, I present to you this image showing the way computers were in the seventies:

Illustrations courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Pictured below is the death spasm of a recording format: the compact cassette (a.k.a. “cassette tape”), sitting on the bargain shelf at a drugstore somewhere in the U.S., its price reduced so that it’s one of the cheapest items in the store. Even gum is probably more expensive:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Here’s another death spasm: an invitation for a farewell party for the cassette held by the book publishing company Hachette, pictured below. Audiobooks were the cassette’s last domain, but in the age of the iPod and phones that double as MP3 players, they had become obsolete:

Image from the New York Times.
Click it to see the source story.

In the first half of the 1980s, the music formats available to a teenager were vinyl records and cassette tape (formally known in the industry as “compact cassette”). CDs hit the market in late 1982, but the first pressings were mostly of classical music and cost anywhere from $20 – $35, well out of the reach of most teenagers (remember, these are 1980s dollars!).

Vinyl was far cheaper: if you were smart and shopped downtown (as opposed to the record stores in the malls, where the prices were $2 – $5 higher), domestic albums sold for about $8 – $12 and imports, special releases and double albums went for about $12 – $18. They didn’t have the signal-to-noise ratio that CDs had, but on a good turntable on a half-decent sound system, you got better sound than a lot of downsampled MP3s playing on the budget speakers that came free with your computer.

The internals of a compact cassette.

At the bottom of the hi-fi spectrum is the compact cassette. A clunky storage medium, it was often “hissy”, with a signal-to-noise ratio equivalent to listening to a jazz band in a small club while sitting near the air conditioner. The tape was prone to stretching from the stresses involved in both normal playback and more so with fast-forwarding and rewinding, especially in the case of the C120 (120 minute) cassette, whose tape had to be made thinner so that its reel would still fit inside the shell. Finally, there was its mechanical nature: it had actual moving parts whose quality would have a direct impact on your sound. A cheap shell, a wobbly reel, a misaligned guide roller or any combination thereof could make it sound worse.

In spite of all these disadvantages, it became an incredibly popular format. Cassettes were portable and handled jostling well, which made them perfect for car audio and the Walkman. They also represented the first time that most people could create what we now take for granted in the age of digital audio: the customized playlist in the form of the mix tape. If you were dating in the ’80s, making a mix tape was an important courtship ritual:

From the Breakup Girl comic, Mixed Messages.
Click the image to read the full comic.

Mix tapes didn’t make everyone happy: the record companies became quite concerned about people passing around copies of their music or making copies of their music for their car or Walkman and put up some campaigns to stop home taping, including the infamous “Home Taping is Killing Music” promotion:

History proved this was a lie.

By the way, it turned out to be a lie, as the music industry boomed as home taping blossomed, and home taping for personal use is not illegal; it’s fair use.

For a while, sales of albums in cassette form surpassed those on vinyl or CD. The lesson to be learned from this is the same one that the MP3 format taught us: in spite of what the audiophiles will tell you, versatility and convenience trumps sound quality.

In the days before MP3s and MySpace, before CD-burning was available to the masses, the cassette was the only economical way for a small band to get their music into their audience’s hands. A number of bands got their start this way; one famous local example was the Barenaked Ladies’ “Yellow Tape”, pictured below, which many fans say featured better performances than those on the CD that followed after they got the record deal:

Now a collector’s item.

Finally there’s a way I used cassettes that you may have never encountered: as a storage medium for computer data. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, before 5 1/4″ floppy drives became cheap and ubiquitous, it was the preferred way to store your home computer’s programs and data. Even the original IBM PC used them:

Slow but reliable: cassette tapes as computer data storage medium. Some synthesizers of the era also used cassette tape for data storage.

(Somewhere in my parents’ basement sits a pile of cassettes holding my high school programming assignments written on Waterloo Structured BASIC for the Commodore PET. I’m curious to see what the programs I wrote back then look like.)

I don’t miss the cassette: I rather like a world where my music is in digital form and moves frictionlessly from my iPod to my computer to my USB key and across the net (and sometimes onto my camera chip when there’s no other place to store it). I haven’t owned a cassette player in about 8 years — come to think of it, I don’t even own a stand-alone CD Player anymore. Still, I feel I should pay tribute to that clunky mechanical piece of tech that served me so well in my youth.

Maybe I’ll pick up that USB key that comes in mix tape-inspired packaging:

In honour of Netscape’s passing, Perl & LWP author Sean M. Burke installed Netscape 0.9 and took it out for a spin, with amusing results.