A blast from the 1980s...

[G6Tanuki]

WH Smith xmas ad, I think from around 1984

[whiskas]

Oohh I really wanted that Spectrum, 48K flavour of course!

[Nickthedentist]

I’d have been happy with the two blank tapes!

[Tim]

I love old ads. They are a window to our social habits of the past. I have an old newspaper from 1934( front page news is the Brighton Trunk Murder) and there are some wonderful radio ads.
The 1980’s ones above are great. I actually remember things like that in Hobby Electronics and similar publications.

[Simondm]

It's slightly disturbing that the disc camera cost more than the Walkman.

I think that, somewhere in the house, we still have a Sony consumer-grade Walkman of that vintage in working order (replay only), and the WMD6Cs are fine (er, mostly!).

It used to be the case that manufacturers subsidised the advertising campaigns of retailers - I wonder if that's why the disc camera was in there...

[Mike Phelan]

Exchange and Mart and K R Whiston were the ones I used to read avidly.

[duncanlowe]

Originally Posted by Simondm

It's slightly disturbing that the disc camera cost more than the Walkman.

I think that, somewhere in the house, we still have a Sony consumer-grade Walkman of that vintage in working order (replay only), and the WMD6Cs are fine (er, mostly!).

Yeas but that 'walkman', is one of the cheap clones that had become prevalent, isn't it?

[mark_in_manc]

I'm surprised by how much the 'raiders of the lost ark' video is. It's easy to forget how much media used to cost - though we didn't have a video, so I am thinking primarily about records and audio tapes. Our record shop was 'Woolies', and I remember around the time of this ad or perhaps a little later, when a CD (something we also didn't have) was £15, whilst a 'nice price' lp (perhaps something from the Queen back catalogue, which were what I used to look out for) was £3. My free paper round (2 hours of a Wed evening) might yield anything from £1.50 to £3, depending on if there were a lot of ad leaflet inclusions or not.

Those of you who are older than me (52) are rolling your eyes - as are those younger, probably. Oh well.

[mark_in_manc]

Originally Posted by Tim

I love old ads. They are a window to our social habits of the past. I have an old newspaper from 1934( front page news is the Brighton Trunk Murder) and there are some wonderful radio ads.

I have a publication from around that time with an ad for a 'portable' radio. In an artist's sketch, it's like a bl**** great suitcase with one side a perforated grille. A well-dressed man and woman stand at some poor soul's doorstep, him holding the thing while she looks languid and says 'let's make it play as we go in'.

How cruelly are our vanities exposed, by long passage of time. It's like looking at the prizes (a clock radio!) on old episodes of Bullseye.

[Richard_FM]

Kodak tried hard to made disc cameras the new intermatic, but they never really caught on.

A while back I watched a tape of episodes of Ally McBeal I recorded at the turn of the Millennium, I never bothered to pause for adverts, which was a good thing as they are a time capsule of now forgotten products.

At one time I was collecting old car magazines that have interesting ads, especially ones for car radios.

[hamid_1]

I like seeing these old adverts. Old Argos catalogues are also very nostalgic to browse through, as well as being useful to put a date and an original price on a vintage item from the flea market.

I'm surprised at the 16k ZX Spectrum being advertised in 1984. The Spectrum+ had come out in that year and I'm pretty sure the 16k rubber key machine would have been discontinued by then. Perhaps the advert was from Christmas 1983?

The disc film camera was a bit of a flop. It was an attempt to make a slim, easy to use camera but the small size of the negatives gave mediocre picture quality. Not every shop sold or processed disc film, and there was no real incentive to buy it instead of any of the existing formats.

And yes, pre-recorded videotapes were relatively expensive. They had to be duplicated in real time (2 hours per tape for a 2 hour movie). Most people rented rather than bought movies on video. As time went by, tapes and DVDs became cheaper to purchase but another form of rental - pay per view and streaming - mostly replaced physical media. There have been some big changes since that advert.

[Keith956]

I had a Sony walkman in the early 80's, the one with an AM/FM tuner that was built into a cassette case, presumably to save space. I'm not sure if it got power from the main body (and sent audio to the headphones) via a connector - or maybe via the tape heads?

[knobtwiddler]

There are photos around that show Sony's Walkman production line. It was seriously advanced for its day, with all kinds of automation / robotic P+P etc.

[Nickthedentist]

The basic (but very sturdy) Sony WM22 cassette Walkman (no radio) was £29.99 at Christmas 1984 (I think).

Lesser, own brand versions (usually with just a peg for the supply spool and with no rewind) were about half that.

[McMurdo]

Ironic that out of all that digital technology, nearly 40 years on and the two more earthy offerings will be around again this christmas - Indiana Jones and Cliff Richard.

[G.Castle]

I took a very close look at the OP's picture, of course not a genuine Sony Walkman. My father still owns his that was bought for him as a present the very early eighties it was something like £80.
He also has the test tape that came with it, the player still works, and sounds astoundingly good.

[G6Tanuki]

Yes, it's a Walkman-clone they're advertising. There were lots of them around in the early/mid-80s, trying to cash in on the 'halo' effect from Sony's iconic personal-portable cassette-player that appeared in the late-70s; some of them were sort-of OK, many more were utterly horrible, with wow&flutter of horrendous proportions if you were actually to try using the thing portably, and a gruesome appetite for batteries [remember that this was before the ubiquity of rechargeable AA NiCd cells].

"You get what you pay for" was never more apt.

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by Richard_FM

Kodak tried hard to made disc cameras the new intermatic, but they never really caught on.

A while back I watched a tape of episodes of Ally McBeal I recorded at the turn of the Millennium, I never bothered to pause for adverts, which was a good thing as they are a time capsule of now forgotten products.

At one time I was collecting old car magazines that have interesting ads, especially ones for car radios.

I actually have one of those Kodak Disc cameras bought new many years ago.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by electronicskip

I actually have one of those Kodak Disc cameras bought new many years ago.

There were various attempts at 'making photography easier' in the 80s and 90s, "APS" being the other mainstream one alongside Kodak's Disc. Like the Disc, it had the major disadvantage of having a massively-smaller negative-size than the old standby 35mm.

The coming of digital photography did for film cameras what the coming of the iPod did for Walkmans and portable personal-CD-players.

[G0HZU_JMR]

I've still got my old 1980s Sony Walkman. It's been in a box in a cupboard for about 30 years. I just checked it is still there. It says WM-F22 on the front. I remember that the FM radio sounded really good on it and it has norm/CRO2 tape selection for cassettes. It was much better than the cheaper clones available at the time.