• (cs)
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
  • (cs)

    I remember paying US$1500.00 for a hard drive back in 1985. Of course, I was much smarter than anyone in these ads --- I got enough room for FORTY FIVE million characters for my money!

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
    Either that or Little Johnny is going to be doing some "after school curriculum"
  • RoverDaddy (unregistered)
    The technology required to capture, store, and process such an image (Assuming 12-14 inches high by 4 inches wide. At 216 dots per inch wide by 120 dots per inch high makes for an image about 864 x 1560 pixels)
    The cheesecake image is ASCII art - you just can't tell from this distance. Captcha: nisl: Nisl to see you Miss Jenkins. Pay up or this picture gets posted to The Well.
  • dandin1 (unregistered) 
    For Some Reason
I Can't  Fathom
That  First  Ad
Is Difficult To
Read.
  • JoPoser (unregistered)

    So, are we going through each 1980s issue of BYTE for these?

  • HopelessIntern (unregistered)

    That kid is 40 now.

    Weird.

  • Anonymous Howard (unregistered) in reply to HopelessIntern

    That kid is weird now.

  • Brontide (unregistered)

    864x1560x1bit = 165kB before RLE or other compression which would probably work pretty well since there are large runs of the same bit. It was probably stored on media at 80kB or less.

  • Brompot (unregistered) in reply to Brontide
    Brontide:
    864x1560x1bit = 165kB before RLE or other compression which would probably work pretty well since there are large runs of the same bit. It was probably stored on media at 80kB or less.

    Allowing you to place 4 of these pictures on a single 360K floppy disk.... No wonder electronic pr0n didn't take shape until the 90's

  • Cv (unregistered)

    Is it just me or is "Center of picture" somewhat confusing when the picture shows two people, two computers and two expansions? None of which is really in the "center of picture"

  • anonymous_coder() (unregistered) in reply to Brompot
    Brompot:
    Brontide:
    864x1560x1bit = 165kB before RLE or other compression which would probably work pretty well since there are large runs of the same bit. It was probably stored on media at 80kB or less.

    Allowing you to place 4 of these pictures on a single 360K floppy disk.... No wonder electronic pr0n didn't take shape until the 90's

    Hehehe - just reminded me of the VGA boot disks we swapped around in high school that had pretty simple animations. The early 90's were not very good for computer pr0n either...

    Captcha: eros... how appropriate :)

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Brompot
    Brompot:
    Allowing you to place 4 of these pictures on a single 360K floppy disk.... No wonder electronic pr0n didn't take shape until the 90's

    Speak for yourself. GIF was available in the 80's. (Though I cheered the end of dithering some years later.)

  • (cs) in reply to Brontide
    Brontide:
    864x1560x1bit = 165kB before RLE or other compression which would probably work pretty well since there are large runs of the same bit.

    Basically what I was going to say.

    I've studied the ad extremely closely, and while I can't really tell due to the quality of the scan and of the original printing of the ad, it looks like the naked lady is printed in mostly solid black with just a few patches of dithering.

    I wouldn't be surprised if run-length encoding could reduce the data size by a factor of 4. And considering that image rasterizers and printers of the early 1980s worked one line at a time (and many still do), I'd have to say the technology of the time was well capable of what is depicted.

    Hey, that's an idea for a Programming Practice [sic] assignment -- write a program that will decode and output a 1-bit RLE image while using the fewest bytes of memory possible.

  • (cs)

    At first glance I thought the computer in the Micropro ad was my cat's litter box. Same size and shape - minus the keyboard though.

  • (cs) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Brompot:
    Allowing you to place 4 of these pictures on a single 360K floppy disk.... No wonder electronic pr0n didn't take shape until the 90's

    Speak for yourself. GIF was available in the 80's. (Though I cheered the end of dithering some years later.)

    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Scraping the barrel a bit with these ones but I like reading them nonetheless, cheers.

  • Nugget (unregistered)

    Similarly, I scanned in a few Antic magazines from 1983 and 1985: http://macnugget.org/photos/antics

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    What I want for Christmas is an Official Red Ryder 200 shot carbine action range model ... I don't think a football would be a very good Christmas present.

    A++++++++++++++++++++++

    (Don't you love how autocomplete now remembers all your dailywtf captchas?)

  • (cs) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
    Either that or Little Johnny is going to be doing some "after school curriculum"
    I'm reminded of the Venom song "Teacher's Pet" google the lyrics but remember NSFW.
  • Buddy (unregistered) in reply to java.lang.Chris;
    java.lang.Chris;:
    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

    Oh my stars, such a vile tongue -- With apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of refinement who perchance have steeled themselves in anticipation of further horrors -- would I be in your disagreeable presence, should I remove my glove and strike you forthwith!

    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!

  • (cs)

    shrug Both the North Star and Epson ads look like run-of-the-mill takeoffs on Norman Rockwell to me.

  • Programming Praxis (unregistered) in reply to galgorah
    galgorah:
    amischiefr:
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
    Either that or Little Johnny is going to be doing some "after school curriculum"
    I'm reminded of the Venom song "Teacher's Pet" google the lyrics but remember NSFW.
    Just an observation, if the genders of the student and teacher were reversed, it would be much less acceptable to comment on Janie doing some "after school curriculum."
  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."

    Didn't you mean the sending end?

  • (cs) in reply to Programming Praxis
    Programming Praxis:
    galgorah:
    amischiefr:
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
    Either that or Little Johnny is going to be doing some "after school curriculum"
    I'm reminded of the Venom song "Teacher's Pet" google the lyrics but remember NSFW.
    Just an observation, if the genders of the student and teacher were reversed, it would be much less acceptable to comment on Janie doing some "after school curriculum."
    Your probably right that general society would be more offended. i myself however have never strayed away from a joke in bad taste.
  • ping floyd (unregistered) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    java.lang.Chris;:
    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

    Oh my stars, such a vile tongue -- With apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of refinement who perchance have steeled themselves in anticipation of further horrors -- would I be in your disagreeable presence, should I remove my glove and strike you forthwith!

    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!

    Or you could spell it correctly. :-)

  • (cs) in reply to Spectre
    Spectre:
    Code Dependent:
    little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "march yourself to the principal's office right this minute young man"
    No no. That image is of the teacher. Little Johnny is going to be on the receiving end of "Straight A's (plus $1000) or I send this to the newspaper."
    Didn't you mean the sending end?
    That would be logically correct. I noted that fact about the original statement, but felt that adjusting it in my response would be too esoteric and confusing for the masses, so I just followed Mark's footsteps down his errant path for the sake of expediency.
  • (cs) in reply to Programming Praxis
    Programming Praxis:
    Just an observation, if the genders of the student and teacher were reversed, it would be much less acceptable to comment on Janie doing some "after school curriculum."
    Noted. Society is what it is.
  • is0lated (unregistered)

    "You can see why we say GRAFTRAX 80 is the head of it's class. There's nothing else in its class"

    I don't quite know if this counts as a good thing...

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!

    Obviously you're not running SpellStar.

  • (cs) in reply to Zygo
    Zygo:
    Buddy:
    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!
    Obviously you're not running SpellStar.
    No, that's just how Buddy spells "Relief"
  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Brompot
    Brompot:
    Brontide:
    864x1560x1bit = 165kB before RLE or other compression which would probably work pretty well since there are large runs of the same bit. It was probably stored on media at 80kB or less.

    Allowing you to place 4 of these pictures on a single 360K floppy disk.... No wonder electronic pr0n didn't take shape until the 90's

    By the early 80's better compression algorithms than RLE were known. Huffman coding of RLE data should get you down to 20K, especially if the image was smoothed first.

    "Image capture and processing" was often some poor lonely soul who manually entered data points by hand (yes, there were things like drum scanners lying around, but manual labor was easier to come by...if you'll pardon the pun). The labor costs would be well under the cost of a luxury car.

    Who said the image actually uses the full resolution of the printer? That could be a 30dpi picture made out of the "block graphics that can be used by any computer" for all we can see from the ad. Scaling images of low resolution to high resolution by multiplying pixels was a well known technique even in 1981.

    Anyone notice that the printer ad contained an offer to upgrade the firmware of existing printer owners for "only" 100 1981 dollars? With just three PROM chips, apparently.

  • Buddy (unregistered) in reply to ping floyd
    ping floyd:
    Buddy:
    java.lang.Chris;:
    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

    Oh my stars, such a vile tongue -- with apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of refinement who perchance have steeled themselves in anticipation of further horrors -- would I be in your disagreeable presence, should I remove my glove and strike you forthwith!

    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTURBATION!

    Or you could spell it correctly. :-)

    Thought of a slogan - there's no masturbation without U. Have no idea what it could be used for.

    I remember once in those old ads seeing a brain divided by a floppy diskette. Not sure the target audience in that.

    There's an Asian women with the flawless British accent who lives in the same building as me, I think she's a he.

    Not really sure of a lot of things these days.

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to is0lated
    is0lated:
    "You can see why we say GRAFTRAX 80 is the head of it's class. There's nothing else in its class"

    I don't quite know if this counts as a good thing...

    Well, it's better than what they say nowadays, where I hear things like "better than anything in its class". (Wow, it's even better than itself!)

  • Buddy (unregistered) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:

    Thought of a slogan - there's no masturbation without U. Have no idea what it could be used for.

    ...

    Not original, 60+ matches on google.

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    Thought of a slogan - there's no masturbation without U. Have no idea what it could be used for.
    There's no masturbation without "bat". (And I have even less of an idea how to use that one.)
  • Anachronda (unregistered)
    At 216 dots per inch wide by 120 dots per inch high

    Don't know where you're pulling those numbers from.

    IIRC, Graftrax 80 simply let you fire each pin in the printhead individually. Since we're talking maybe a 7x9 matrix at 10 characters per inch, it'd be more like 70 dpi horizontal (10 cpi * 7 dots) by 54 dpi (6 lpi * 9 dots). Going with your 4inch x 14 inch number, it'd be more like 280x756 monochrome pixels, or about 26kB uncompressed.

    CAPTCHA: capio, although a stock FX80 could do lowercase.

  • azealithial (unregistered)

    Does anyone else find it strange just how far the teachers legs are bent forward? I didn't know knees would bend that far.

  • Conan the Masturion (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Buddy:
    Thought of a slogan - there's no masturbation without U. Have no idea what it could be used for.
    There's no masturbation without "bat". (And I have even less of an idea how to use that one.)
    No, but I do ...
  • (cs) in reply to azealithial
    azealithial:
    Does anyone else find it strange just how far the teachers legs are bent forward? I didn't know knees would bend that far.
    Now that you mention it, it seems it may be badly photoshopped...

    Yeah! Look at those shadows... they're all wrong. Definitely 'shopped.

  • (cs)

    Ok, since you are obviously digging more at the pictures than the ads themselves (and doing bad math in the process)

    Why not the old classic where AT&T picked the deathstar for its corporate logo...

  • SpasticWeasel (unregistered) in reply to Buddy

    You should only be allowed to write it if you can spell it correctly

  • (cs) in reply to Anachronda
    Anachronda:
    At 216 dots per inch wide by 120 dots per inch high

    Don't know where you're pulling those numbers from.

    The advert, dummy. Try clicking the picture for the large version, or failing that, reading glasses.
  • (cs) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    java.lang.Chris;:
    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

    Oh my stars, such a vile tongue -- With apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of refinement who perchance have steeled themselves in anticipation of further horrors -- would I be in your disagreeable presence, should I remove my glove and strike you forthwith!

    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!

    Wasn't he a character in Captain Pugwash?
  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Anachronda
    Anachronda:
    At 216 dots per inch wide by 120 dots per inch high

    Don't know where you're pulling those numbers from.

    The advertising copy, maybe?

    Dot matrix printers have never been able to actually print at 216 dpi in either direction. The dots are much bigger than 1/100th of an inch, let alone 1/216th. The numbers refer to what is possible after multiple passes by the print head, moving the paper slightly (about, say, 1/120th of an inch) between horizontal passes to get the vertical resolution. You print all the even scan lines first, then all the odd ones. There would often be rules like you can't have two horizontally adjacent black dots because the printer required enough time for the pin to retract back into the print head before firing it again.

    The print head had 9 wires in a single vertical column, so horizontal resolution was limited only by the step size of the motor that moves the print head. Vertically, you'd get whatever the pitch of the column was in a single pass, or some integer multiple of it if you stepped the paper between passes on a single line (again limited by the step size of the platen motor). Of course what you'd actually get would be mostly limited by the repeatability of the mechanics involved...which, given that a print head with heat sink weighed over a pound, the paper was fed in with fan-folds, and there was no optical feedback system like you have in modern inkjets, was pretty awful.

  • (cs)
    On the left, you have the Cameo Connection [ ... ] On the right is the Corvus Connection
    Not from where I'm sitting, they aren't. Pics or GTFO!
  • MadCow42 (unregistered) in reply to RoverDaddy

    [quote user="RoverDaddy"][quote]The technology required to capture, store, and process such an image (Assuming 12-14 inches high by 4 inches wide. At 216 dots per inch wide by 120 dots per inch high makes for an image about 864 x 1560 pixels)[/quote] The cheesecake image is ASCII art - you just can't tell from this distance. quote]

    Actually, the first mistake is assuming that 1 "dot" from the printer must equal 1 pixel in the image. Even a grayscale image would have 8-bits of data per pixel (256 gray levels), while the printer dot could only represent 1-bit of data.

    Doing the math, if the printout tried to capture the full grayscale (by halftoning), the image wouldn't need to be 864x1560 pixels... but only 54 x 98 pixels. (you'd use a matrix of 16x16 printer dots to represent the 8-bit gray level of each image pixel).

    Modern day techniques allow you to do better tonal reproduction with fewer dots - but still, you need at least 8x8 pixels to do a decent job.

    MadCow.

  • Wodin (unregistered) in reply to dandin1
    dandin1:
    For Some Reason
I Can't  Fathom
That  First  Ad
Is Difficult To
Read.
    Maybe it has something to do with that Famous Seagale Technology.
  • MadCow42 (unregistered) in reply to Smash King

    Photoshopped... no. Back then, it'd probably be a Quantel Paintbox... a multi-million dollar mini-mainframe system with a huge-ass CRT monitor that was designed/dedicated to image manipulation and design.

    Back in about 1998, I had customers offering to give me these things if I'd just haul them away... amazing for their time, but quickly outdated with the advent of Photoshop.

    MadCow.

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Buddy:
    java.lang.Chris;:
    Is "cheering the end of dithering" another term for m*sturbation, like "polishing the one eyed gopher" or "burping the worm"?

    Oh my stars, such a vile tongue -- With apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of refinement who perchance have steeled themselves in anticipation of further horrors -- would I be in your disagreeable presence, should I remove my glove and strike you forthwith!

    This isn't the Victorian era, you can write MASTERBATION!

    Wasn't he a character in Captain Pugwash?
    I expect you're thinking of Master Blaster, from Beyond Thunderdome.

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