Old New Technology

I love finding ancient commercials and news reports for outdated technology. It really makes you understand how consumer electronics are just like tissue paper: you use one up and then buy another. Here are a few examples. First up, a news report from KRON San Francisco about newspapers... ON YOUR COMPUTER! I particularly like how one of the interviewees is credited as "owns a home computer." Wow, he might even own a transportable telephone!

Speaking of transportable telephone, from 1989, we get this Centel advertisement. I think. Actually, this could have very easily been a commercial for boats or Jeeps or viagra. But there, in every third shot, we get glimpses of the revolutionary brick we'd come to know as a cell phone. Check out the end of the commercial when the Jeep parks on the dock. I'm thinking there are takes where the driver didn't stop in time. Perhaps this was the third Jeep they went through... and the second actor.

And finally (so that I'm not surfing Youtube all day) let's return to a time when remote controls were new devices. From 1961, enjoy this video promoting the remote control. Just watch the first 20 seconds. At first, I thought the remote control was that weird Christmas ornament. And for a while, I thought that the watering pot beside the TV was a hookah. That'd be some living room.

Jesus Christ! If the remotes were still that big, we'd never lose them!