With floating disc technology, “Pac-Man watches gobble all day long for you.”

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As if you hadn’t had enough Christmas already. Well, here comes yet another Christmas-related piece: my latest article on PCWorld.com. It’s titled “A Very Vintage Tech Christmas” and it’s a slideshow of vintage home computer ads. A few of the ads are decidedly Christmas-themed, and the others focus either on families or pitching PCs to home buyers.

Unfortunately, PC World’s slideshow setup makes the text in the ads too small to read. But at least you can look at the pictures. I hope you enjoy it.

How does Santa keep track of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice? A computer database, of course. And it runs on an Apple II.

Looks like Woz saved Christmas!

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[ Editor’s Note: I asked Eric Lambert, a VC&G contributor, to write something entertaining for Christmas in the vein of his Halloween Spam poem. Just yesterday he delivered, sending me an MP3 of modified holiday jingles with a computer twist. It’s a tad cheesy, yes, but it’s full of fun and spirit. Thanks, Eric! ]

Download the MP3 file here or read a full transcript after the break.

[ Continue reading Eric’s VC&G Christmas Medley » ]

As a sequel to last year’s “Very TRS-80 Christmas,” we have this ad for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. I’m not sure what makes this model “better” than the first Color Computer (CoCo), aside from obvious: different keyboard, ugly case-retooling, and perhaps more RAM.

Unfortunately, this unit ages to a nasty brown and its rubber-dome keyboard isn’t much of an improvement (I still like the CoCo 1’s keyboard better). But at least Tandy saw it fit to advertise the unit with a Christmas theme, which is quite relevant to the season at hand.

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