Microsoft’s got a pretty stellar track record of terrible Windows infomercials. Some for the consumer, some internal, all pretty rough. This 1988 video showcases Windows/386, a fairly impressive upgrade to Windows that introduced multitasking among other features. The impressiveness of the upgrade does not come through in this video. What begins as a dry-but-corny corporate…
Through A Modem – Prodigy Commercial (1990)
There’s something comforting about this mellow, brown 1990 ad for the Prodigy internet service. It’s two minutes (two minutes!) of the glory and promise of the internet, laid out in optimistic clarity.
A yuppie has his aging neighbor over to his aging-neighbor-approved house and is eager to show off his computer. The yuppie explains the Prodigy service to him, the shimmering beacon of a curated news feed, an online shopping portal, and the awful idea of remote banking in the early ’90s.
By the end of the pitch, old Jack’s on board and internetting all by himself. Hopefully not on any of *those* newsgroups.
It’s worth pointing out that Prodigy did NOT load as quickly as it did in this ad. Each page was a three to four minute load for me, on average, on my 2600 baud modem. I don’t know that I got speeds like this until the mid 2000’s!
-ds