Can You Guess What Yr. This (Newsweek) Computer Ad is from?

[Crystal Clarity]

I recently uncovered a 'dated' Newsweek magazine while cleaning out my shed. It's not what I'd consider 'old-old' but enough so that I had to laugh at some of the things in it like this advertisement for an Ollevetti M20 Personal Computer. I'm not very computer savvy but even I could tell how primitive. So here goes:

The full page ad is titled "Brains and Beauty" and shows a hilariously outdated PC. Here is the description:

If you thought beauty was only skin deep, you haven't seen the Olivetti M20. It combines both brains and beauty and is the most powerful personal computer on the market.The M20 pc incorporates the latest technological advances. A true 16-bit processor. High resolution graphics, and a display that can be divided into 16 different windows. A memory capacity expandable up to 512Kbytes and external disk storage of up to 11 MB.

It's not only supported by it's own powerful operating system PCOS, but also by CP/M 80, CP/M 86 and MSDOS. It's program languages include Microsoft BASIC, CBASIC, and Assembler. The M20 has an extensive application library including electronic work sheets, word processing, data base management, scientific, technical and accounting programs.

:rofl:

Any idea what year this advertisement appeared in Newsweek? Bonus point... what month?

[TroglodyteScholar]

1. This sounds a bit older than computers I used at first...

...so I'm going to say 1983?

[Crystal Clarity]

2. Very Close

I can tell this thread won't last very long with such a good guess on the first try! :-)

[HopeHoops]

3. 1984

[Crystal Clarity]

5. Nope older,

But since the next person is likely to get it I might as well just say... November 1982

Some other funny and/or interesting nuggets beyond the mentioned ad:

Hart Is Under Way: Colorado Sen. Gary Hart is about to pick up the pace of his underdog presidential campaign... blah, blah, (we know how that ended)

Also I counted 9 full page cigarette ads in this 120 pg edition

Other headlines:
Will Reagan run again?
Bagdad's salt line Standoff(against Iran- puff piece on Saddam)
Reservations on Reagan
Murdoch's bid for Boston's Herald American

But thank you guys for playing. Wasn't that ad kind of funny when you see how far we've come? :hi:

[HopeHoops]

7. I used an Osborne in '83, similar specs but with two 5 1/4" floppies.

The damn screen was only about 5 1/2" diagonal. I had to drag it between my office and Goddard to transfer files from a DEC Rainbow word processor. I had to write an assembly program to capture the data the DEC was flinging out over the serial port. The timing was so tight that I had to remove the check for how much memory it was using. Pain in the damn ass.

Then on top of that, the BRILLIANT design of the Osborne put the stress from the monitor and drives on the motherboard. Fortunately, mine didn't suffer a motherboard failure (as many did), but the bouncing kept putting the floppy drives out of alignment. So, I would have to disassemble the damn thing to adjust the drives, the cables were short so I had to balance parts on books and tissue boxes, and every damn disk was recorded at a different speed. I had it in the shop three times before I finally decided to just deal with it on my own.

At the office, I had to use PIP to transfer the files to the MS DOS machines so they could load them into WordStar. That was a fucking good word processor. Exactly the same key commands on every platform. I had an Apple II+ with a CP/M card that ran it beautifully (especially since it had an 80 column card too). Actually, I still have that Apple II+ and last I checked it still worked fine.

[From The Ashes]

4. 1982-1983

16-bit processor? boy howdy! sign me up! :rofl:

[Crystal Clarity]

6. I know... Isn't that a riot?

It'd be interesting to see how much they charged for that pc. The ad didn't say. 1982 was right BTW. :-)