Some not-so-bad ads from 80s computer magazines: Christmas edition!
I really wanted to look at holiday ads. But not all of them were awful so we're switching things up!
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10/10, no notes. Seriously. I went digging for Christmas ads of the strip mall photoshoot and middle school essay variety and came up empty handed. Instead of the usual fare, I found fun, memorable, and compelling spreads, like the one above.
Santa as an expert database manager hits all the right notes. It’s an unexpected combo that still manages to immediately click, passing the cavemen test without using the product name in the H1!
The only thing you can ding Microrim on is the entirely unexplained reference to Clout, which just so happens to be my second favorite Christmas ad of 1984:
Santa as a database admin was way more endearing than Mr Claus the business manager. But look at the staging in that photo. They even hand painted a naughty/nice database on the screen!
As to what CLOUT actually does, its chapter in the R:Base manual reads like an LLM manifesto. “Questions can be poorly formulated and incomplete and CLOUT will do its best to provide some sort of sensible response…it can be used by people who have little or no training…especially for answering ad hoc, one-of-a-kind questions.”
Normann Nielsen already touched on the overlap between CLOUT and today’s chatbots, reminiscing about pushing the 1984 software far enough to see a “Clout has become confused” error. This, after trying to teach it to parse “There is nothing in the world as quiet as snow.”
There’s a ton of Microrim history worth investigating and maybe I’ll tackle that in another issue. Today is all about Christmas ads, though, and there are a few more worth showing off.
I love when a copywriter prioritizes wordplay so much that they’re willing to say bad or confusing things about a product. And “make your list and scan it twice” is exactly that, based on the demo in Computer Chronicles’ 1987 Christmas Special. You got one shot when capturing an image.
The board appears to be Complete PC’s Complete FAX peripheral, a 9600-baud modem with on-board ports for the Complete Hand Scanner, based on a review in Modern Electronics. Someone please tell me what the dark rectangle is near the top of the scanner!
So bad ad copy, great visuals. Let’s flip that script.
God knows why they needed to add motion blur to their absolutely gorgeous stocking stuffer (the HD shots from this collector are worth checking out). But that header text makes up for a lot of missed opportunities.
Logitech’s first mouse, the P4, hit the market in 1982. That means celebrating their two millionth shipped unit in 1988 works out to an average of 333,000 per year, which is wild.
And, on the heels of Logitech’s suggestive ad is the much more suggestive Christmas-themed spread for Interlude II:
While not as “compelling” as the other ads on the list, it’s also not the worst one I’ve shared in this newsletter. And aside from some tacky and problematic copywriting, it’s less controversial than your average Top 40s song today.
If you don’t have two minutes to spare watching a few of the computerized interviews, it’s just a list of questions with five possible text responses. And it’s primarily targeted at couples! So not nearly as provocative as the ad infers.
If anything, a review of Interlude II’s popular predecessor makes it sound downright wholesome. “Suzy, one of our foxiest secretaries here at 80 Micro [magazine], displayed so little enthusiasm during one interview session that she was directed to interlude number 29. The scenario for this interlude instructed her to stay home alone and curl up with a good book.”
This, compared to Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, which released in the same year with zero advertising (out of fear of blowback) and far more X-rated content than Interlude II. [And, according to Wikipedia, Lounge Lizards also had an age verification system based on basic trivia questions kids wouldn’t know the answers to, including “OJ Simpson is…” with “under indictment” as an incorrect answer, seven years before his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown.]
Honorable mentions for Christmas themed 80s tech ads that didn’t make the list include Curtis Accessories (for Santa in loafers), Datalife Holiday Disk Pack (for floppies crammed into a stocking), and TRS-80 Model 100 (solely because I had one of these as a kid and adored it).
Happy holidays!
Links to Resources:
PC World Nov 1984 (PDF page 233)
PC World Dec 1984 (PDF pages 18-19)
Managing information with microcomputers (Chapter 16)
PC World Dec 1987 (PDF page 80)
Modern Electronics Aug 1988 (PDF pages 56-58)
Byte Nov 1988 (PDF pages 82-83)
1988 ClearCase Mouse - Imgur
Logitech P4 Mouse - Wikipedia
PC World Dec 1988 (PDF page 261)
Interlude II for the Apple II - YouTube
Interlude, turn your love life into exciting, adventurous, delicious fun! - Retro365
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards - Wikipedia
PC Magazine Dec 1989 (PDF page 123)
Byte Dec 1983 (PDF pages 185, 660)
