[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Man’s New Best Friend?
March 31st, 2008 by Benj Edwards
“Gather ’round, kids, and warm up by the TRS-80 Model 4” (1983)
[Edit (04/02/2008) – This was an April Fool’s Day scan. It was edited by me to look weird. Hope you enjoyed it! ]
Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever used a computer with all four members of your nuclear family at the same time?
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March 31st, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Wow… Those girls are scary looking… The 2 on the right look the same and the 2 on the left look the same. Did they have cloning back in 83? I never got to play with any of the older computers but i wish i had. I been checking this site out for a while and i love looking at all the stuff i never got to play with but this pic is creepy. lol So i had to reply to it. Oh i just remembered i did use an apple 2 in school but very briefly.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:55 pm
So, to answer your question at a technical level, yes, I’ve used a computer with four concurrent users (game consoles). I’ve even had linux running on a PC and then used another PC as a dumb terminal into it to play a game — this was around 1996.
What I find interesting in this scan is that it is MAN’s best friend, but they show ‘chopped images of a woman (it’s the same woman, flipped left to right, scaled, hair added, etc.). Probably done with photography / publishing tricks and not with a computer back in those days……I’m sure it took them a week or two to get it looking good. These days, someone who is good a Photoshop could have it done in a couple of hours.
Layne
March 31st, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Radio Snack?
March 31st, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I have seen the ‘radio snack’ before on these ads as a typographic error from the company’s marketing departments. The people though, I have not seen. Very strange.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:12 pm
The graphic dept. was so tired from editing the photo, their right index finger missed a single key and didnt even notice… lol
March 31st, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Our high school had a whole computer lab filled with the precursor of this machine, the Model III. We did get a few of these in ’84 to replace some hosed IIIs, but they weren’t much better. There’s a reason why they called this machine the “TRaSh-80”.
On the other hand, I *did* learn Z80 assembly on the Model III…
April 1st, 2008 at 2:40 am
THE SAME PEOPLE
April 1st, 2008 at 7:29 am
I just don’t get it – obviously this is supposed to be a family with two kids and a dog.
If they all have the same faces on purpose, is the ad supposed to suggest that TRS80 users are plunged into some Aphex-Twin parallel reality where everybody has the same face?
Or is it just a mistake and that is whats so funny about the ad? Or was the image postprocessed? I are confused!
April 1st, 2008 at 9:49 am
Happy April Fool’s Day everbody!
April 4th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
i thought jokes were supposed to be funny?
epic fail doug.