Awful Tech Ads from the 80′s

April 6, 2011
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There are many things from the 1980s that are best forgotten for most of us. The clothes, fashion, music and films can best be described as cheesy although cringingly embarrassing may be more accurate in some cases. Look through the majority of family photo albums and there may well be a big gap between 1979 and 1990 that the photographer and their subjects would like us all to forget about. This selective memory loss isn’t reserved solely for family pictures and many choose to forget just how bad the TV, films, and other media were at the time too.

Horrible TV Ads
Happily for everybody else, people like Steve Ballmer put their names, their faces, and their reputations to cheesy 1980s trends. On this occasion, though, we’re talking about TV ads rather than family photo albums. The 1980s were known for infomercial type ads and the emergence of companies like Microsoft and Apple meant there were a lot of ads floating around at the time. Not all of them were great and it’s remarkable to think that companies like Apple managed to survive beyond these early days.

Microsoft
Microsoft really does have a lot to answer for. It has been responsible for a lot of annoyingly catchy jingles and some really quite effective advertising campaigns. It has also been responsible for some serious poor ones too. We can’t really include the horrible Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads that were launched and quickly binned in 2008 because they came too late for this piece.

Windows 1.0
However, the Windows 1.0 advert from the mid 1980s does still grace the page. It was a hideous parody of an infomercial although, to be honest, it reminds us more of a second hand car ad featuring the salesmen himself.

Apple
Apple; the company that has made a name for itself by adding a seemingly innocuous letter “I” to the beginning of previously inanimate objects and creating a technological revolution, hasn’t been averse to the occasional embarrassing ad either. In fact they take a couple of spots in this hall of embarrassing shame.

Macintosh
1984 was a big year for Apple advertisements. First there was the Ridley Scott directed advertisement based on the George Orwell book 1984. It enjoyed masses of hype from anybody and everybody despite the fact that, we believe, it was only ever aired nationally once during the Super Bowl.

Atari
Atari is hardly the power that it once was and while the Amiga may have all but overthrown the gaming system back in the day, there is a small place in many people’s hearts that will belong to Atari but they too were capable of camp 1980s adverts.

Gaming System
Embarrassing, camp, and cheesy! Not only could this be the Wikipedia entry for the 1980s but it also perfectly described the Atari gaming system advertisement from the same period. Cue Wham wannabes.

Pole Position
Pole Position was a ground breaking game for its time; it was the 1980s after all. It offered what was then described as a 3D gaming display, although honestly we think it’s pushing it to describe it as being 3D in any way but such were the joys of a bygone era of technological ignorance.

In this ridiculously over the top ad, a man is forced to race his wife and children in a formula 1 car after his own car is plucked into the air by a giant hand. It could either be a Monty Python sketch or an ad for a formula 1 racing game it just so happens to be the latter in this instance.