Besides contributing at @TheDailyWTF, I write DevDisasters for Visual Studio Magazine, and involved in various side projects including child rearing and marriage.

In browsing my collection of vintage 80's ads, it's interesting to see how many of the things we use daily were actually around back then, but ...different.

Take optical storage for example. We have CDs, we have DVDs, but what about the venerable 12" Laserdisc? Besides movies, the Sony LDP-2000 offered up a serial interface, 15 hours of compressed audio per side of each videodisc, and 221 megabytes of digital data. Pretty impressive considering the time. Now, if only the discs could have been just a little bit smaller...

Back in 2006, Apple released OS X Leopard which included their incremental backup Time Machine wunder-software. However, they were beaten to market about 20 years earlier by the Time Machine 2! ...kind of.

Finally, check out the two full page ads below. Notice the dorky looking guy? That's a 21 year old Michael Dell appearing in an ad for the company that he founded in his dorm room named PC's Limited. Like many of the filthy rich IT entrepeneurs of the day, he dropped out of college to continue building his computer sales empire which ultimately morphed into the Dell Inc. of today!