Retro Tech Tuesday: Pole Position Ad

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of the ad agency behind this 80's gem... Let's say you've just been tasked with creating a commercial for the home version of the era's most popular arcade racing game, Pole Position. What would that commercial look like?

If you said it would open with an annoying family, followed by an even more annoying announcer, followed by way too much road racing intercut with way too little actual game play, and then wrap it all up with some sort of bizarre post-apocalyptic scene, and more yelling from the announcer (along with a reference to "skid marks"), then you would've created something frightfully similar to this:

Retro Tech Tuesday: Original iPod Ad

It's amazing how quickly things can get dated. I can remember when I first saw this commercial, I thought it was a cool way to get people to understand the concept of the iPod. In retrospect, I have to agree with one YouTube commenter who said it looks like the iPod makes you dance like an idiot.

Here's a look at how far the iPod, and Apple's ad campaigns have come:

Retro Tech Tuesday: Let's Head to the Prodigy Diner

According to the YouTube poster MisterSenseless, this video was part of a CD-Rom packaged along with a phone modem. Yes, the visuals are "so 90's," but just as much fun to me is to see and hear what is clearly an early QuickTime codec: if you watched much video on your computer back then, the saturated colors, not-quite-crisp audio, and blocky movement will take you right back:

Retro Tech Tuesday: Telefunken Tubes!

A brief history to make sure we're all on the same page. Today's electronics rely heavily on microchips. Before that, it was mainly solid state transistors that kept TVs and radios humming. Going back further you had the wonderful world of vacuum tubes.

Somewhat similar in appearance to a lightbulb, tubes would need to be replaced  when they would blow out. Which meant buying new tubes. Which meant tube manufacturers had to reach potential customers, and what better way than an odd (and possibly racist) animated ad, showing just how much better musical notes are treated when you choose Telefunken tubes.

The company, which still exists in some form today, was a German electronics powerhouse, founded in 1903. This ad dates from the 1950's. In this age of non-user serviceable parts, we will probably never see a similar ad for an iPhone battery replacement, or hard drive upgrade. The good old days...

Retro Tech Tuesday: HP Circa 1986

I don't know what this ad is trying to say: HP engineers are loners? That they take long car rides to find creative inspiration? That working at HP gets you a free hat? Or perhaps the idea the star of this ad had is for a fleet of those (then) newfangled cellular telephones so that they wouldn't have to rely on finding a gas station in the middle of nowhere to phone in their next big idea.

All kidding aside, this ad does a decent job for the time, of trying to connote the innovation behind the HP brand, rather than a specific product: