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Nine awesome computer ads from the 70s and 80s

Posted in Main on November 25th, 2008 by Pingdom

There are lots of vintage ad collections out there, and it’s always a fun to look through them. For your viewing pleasure, we have handpicked nine of the most fun, creative or just plain weird computer ads we have ever seen.

Below you will find classic ads from Apple, Texas Instruments, IBM, BASF, Honeywell, Maxell and more.

Two hot bytes

Apple getting witty about their name

A maybe even sexy 1200 bps modem

Back when Bill Cosby was all the rage

A dragon with a chip on its shoulder

The indestructible 3.5-inch floppy (most optimistic ad ever?)

In the future, everyone will use floppy disks

IBM PC, only $2,108 for the 64KB model

But computers were best in the 60s. Really. It tells fortunes!

We hope you enjoyed this little collection! :)

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Very, very nice. :) I love retro design.

Retro deliciousness!

Some of these are lovely. That dragon is fantastic!

You gotta love the attempts to combine sex appeal and computer hardware. Reminds be a bit of the car industry and their booth babes (or maybe the games industry would be a better comparison in this case).

I’m not sure what surprises me more — that we’ll all be using floppy disks, or that we’ll all be robots

I always loved the Apple one! I miss retro designs, Mentos had a great campaign too back in the late 80’s, early 90’s.

just brilliant

i miss the non-x86 days…

They were right. Everyone DID use floppys…but not for long.

These are great. I love the “in the future, everyone will use floppy disk” and the “computer brain for $4.99.”

Got any for the Osborne or the Kaypro?

FLOPPY HARAKIRI!!!

Oh yeah, that Penril Modem still does it for me. RRRR! :-) Thanks for sharing!

The BASF ad is awesome. I think it would still work if it ran in today’s PC Mag and people wouldn’t realize that no one uses floppies any more.

As a collector of vintage programmable calculators, I wander if these kind of adds where ever made for calculators/pocket computers? I would love to put some up on my site…

While growing up I actually had one of those Digi Comp I’s (the plastic unit at the end) in the 60s. The manual gave the programming setups for several functions, but no instructions or obvious clue as to how to program anything different. It was kinda fun but disappointing in that I knew there ought to be a way to actually do your own computer programming. It was a few years later before I was able to use and program a real computer.

wow these ads are so cool, i too bad we are not using floppy disks now as it is the future back in the 70’s. these are really funny ads i think people in the 70’s had a good sense of humor.

Haha ^^ nice, is there a section to follow the RSS feed

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Major Google App Engine hiccup reveals weaknesses

Posted in Main on July 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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Pingdom adds FREE website monitoring

Posted in Pingdom on July 1st, 2009 by Pingdom

We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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A gallery of geeky galleries

Posted in Main on June 30th, 2009 by Pingdom

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com set to grow past 10 million blogs in 2009

Posted in Main on June 26th, 2009 by Pingdom

Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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The triumph of Linux as a supercomputer OS

Posted in Main on June 24th, 2009 by Pingdom

Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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