It’s amusing to take a look back at the past. For example, did you know that if you buy a Sony minidisc player, attractive barefoot women will sit on the shelf in your garage in sassy little black dresses? Or that back in 1983, CompuServe had the word email as a trademark? These are the things you learn when you go back into the archives and take a look at dead technology advertisements.
It’s funny how these things appear in hind sight. Like pagers. Everyone had a pager back in the 90’s, didn’t they? Yet not even 10 years later and they’re as useless as a Blu Ray player will be in 5 years. I’d actually argue that Blu Ray as a home video format is already obsolete, but whatever.
Things are changing faster than ever now; in 1981 it took six hours to download a text file of the newspaper, but just last night I watched a two hour movie that loaded and started playing in less than a minute via Netflix’s streaming video servers. In 1998, it took me that long to load a simple HTML webpage.
Tags: format wars, dead formats, vintage advertising, ads, dead technology ads, old technology