Once upon a time before all of our media went digital, tech-lovers used to peruse the ads in the Sunday paper looking for great deals on electronics. The Best Buy ad was definitely one of the best, holding promises of computers, RAM, TVs and everything else a geek heart dreams about. This Best Buy ad from 1996 takes us back to that innocent time when pagers were still a thing and music was still sold on cassette tape.

Among the nostalgic gems in this ad: a Logitech color scanner for $279 (the printer/scanner/copier/fax machine sitting on this editor’s desk right now cost a whopping $60, for purposes of comparison), a 166 MHz Packard Bell PC with 16MB of memory for $1999, and some kind of instructional Macarena video (on VHS!) for just $4.99.

Although cellular phones definitely weren’t a huge part of Best Buy’s business in 1996, they do have a few models listed in this ad – none of them small enough to fit in an average pocket, however.

The tech store ads we’re used to seeing these days aren’t actually too much different other than the prices and speeds of the technology on offer. But it’s always a little humbling to look back and realize that this 1996 ad actually represented some really high-tech stuff for the time.

The post Yesterday’s News: Vintage Store Ad is a Tech Time Capsule first appeared on Gajitz.

Few things are quite as entertaining as taking a look back into what the future used to look like in the past. This commercial for Bushells Tea from the 1940s sends the message that, although the world was poised on the brink of great overarching change, people would always drink tea.

What stands out about the commercial is that many of the predictions actually did turn out to be true. We do, in fact, travel all around the planet in relatively short amounts of time. We live in modern, technology-rich cities. Although skyscraper airports are still a work of fiction, we can happily confirm that people are still drinking tea 70 years after this commercial – and people in Australia are still drinking Bushells.

The post World of Tea-Morrow: Awesome Retrofuturistic Commercial first appeared on Gajitz.

Sexy pictures, suggestive text and attractive models have been used to sell everything from shoes to cigarettes to farm equipment. At first glance, sex and technology may seem like strange bedfellows. But these vintage tech ads successfully used sexy suggestion to sell computers and other tech products.

Consumers who weren’t sure whether they really needed that new computer or modem could rest assured that buying such geeky items wouldn’t necessarily make them geeks. After all, beautiful models were representing these products – and beautiful people only associate with the very best things in life.

From scantily-clad ladies to nerdy guys who were clearly about to have some fun, these ads demonstrate the best and worst of advertising. They’re persuasive, but they’re kind of cheap. They’re creative, but super cheesy. Then again, what would advertising be without the cheap tricks we’ve come to know and love/hate?

The post Absolutely Alluring Ads: 6 Sexy Vintage Techy Adverts first appeared on Gajitz.

What would the world be like today if our favorite modern technologies had been invented decades earlier? What if we’d spent the 1960s Twittering and YouTubing – would everything be completely different today? These playful faux-vintage advertisements were created by Sao Paulo advertising agency Moma and they illustrate technology in an era completely unprepared for it.

Call it retro-tech propaganda or call it a set of cleverly anachronistic illustrations. Either way, the 60s-styled images are beautiful homages both to a bygone era and to the technology that we can’t live without today.

Maybe you don’t think of YouTube or Twitter as essential, life-altering bits of technology, but they have clearly changed the way we live our daily lives.

This project is funny on the surface, but it also brings up questions about our own future. What will the world be like when social networking tools really have been around for half a century?

The post Anachronistic Ads: Modern Tech Adverts Go Back in Time first appeared on Gajitz.

Augmented reality programs for our smartphones might seem like the next big thing, but what most people don’t realize is that we’ve been living in a world of augmented reality for quite some time already. The enormous amount of information we are bombarded with every day is illustrated in the short film Kapitaal from Studio Smack.

KAPITAAL from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

The film shows plainly how we are surrounded by visual stimuli everywhere we go. With the rest of the world blacked out and only the commercial messages visible, it’s easy to see just how overloaded we are. This ever-present commercial information is meant to influence our buying patterns, but the sheer amount of information around us every day makes its effectiveness somewhat doubtful.

The post The Information Age: Living in Advertising Overload first appeared on Gajitz.