[yitchelle]

Man, those adverts sure brings back the memories. Looking at them now (I am in my mind 40s), I am really surprise how much more "hardware" focus the adverts were. Many of them have pictures of ICs, add-on cards for display extensions etc. There was even one from Tektronics about their 60Mhz CRO.

And the Apple II clones and the PC clones...:-)

Back then, I was just going through high school with an Atari 800.

[ufo]

I really like this gem from the Texas Instruments ad on page 145:

"The function key advantage: We give you 12 function keys that you can easily program to make your work simpler and easier. The best the competition can do is 10 or fewer keys"

[sizzzzlerz]

Its like going back to the black monolith at the Dawn of Mankind. Most of the advertisers have been gone for 25 years, I bet. I did spot an interesting ad on page 258 teasing the release of Excel, to be the reason for buying a computer.

[protomyth]

from an ad:

  With Microbuffer, you don't have to wait for your 
  printer to finish before you resume using your 
  computer.
  
  Data is received and stored at fast speeds, then 
  released from Microbuffer's memory to your 
  printer.
  
  This is called buffering. The more you print, the 
  more productive it makes your workflow.
  
  Depending on the version of Microbuffer, these 
  buffering capacities range from a useful 8K of 
  random access memory - big enough for 8,000 
  characters of storage - up to a very large 256K - 
  enough for 256,000 characters of storage.

[yitchelle]

Love the line "The more you print, the more productive it makes your workflow". I need to get that dot matrix printer connected up to my computer and start printing straight away, I can feel my productivity increasing.

[PhasmaFelis]

Hardware and business-focused. It's interesting how you never really see ads targeting business uses now that personal computers are ubiquitous.

Notably, the primary market for high-end desktop components is now gamers, not businesses. I was quite amused at a recent temp job when I was helping build a computing array for integrated circuit design, and most of the components we were handling had names like Destroyer and Razor Ripjaw.

[trampolinator]

You can read other issues too:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date