Ooooo!  Ken notices!

Ken: Sure, Barbie!

Barbie: Look, it says “Barbie” on my blankets and pillows, it’s hot pink with fancy lace on everything, even the canopy!   I want to lay in it right now!  Weee!   (Barbie jumps into bed)

Ken:  Well I must say Barbie, your bed’s pretty gay.  Ah well, there’s no room for me, anyway.

Barbie:  Sure there is, lay on your back, and I’ll get on top!  If you want your own spot though, you’ll have to speak with Mattel.

This commercial rocks out to the 80′s – big clothes, neon lights, and big hair.  Oh yes, even Ken has big hair (silver metallic clothes and a pink guitar, as well).  Thankfully he was sold seperately….

There’s also lots of dancing, which looks less like dancing and more like a slight bending at the hips while flailing your arms like you’re drowning.   Rock on Barbie.  Rock on.

Teddy Ruxpin was a cool toy from the 1980′s with some clever technology:  Instead of using the casette with left / right for stereo, they adapted one of the tracks for mono audio and the other track for Teddy’s mouth movements.  This kept him talking in sync to what was coming out of the speaker.  There was an extra notch in the Teddy tapes so the cassette player in his backside would know if it had an audio tape or a Teddy story tape.  He told stories of his adventures with all of his pals including Grubby, a strange centipede-like creature with the same stupid/gentle smile who also became a toy.

In this ancient world, IBM came synonymous with business information management.  So, IBM marketed heavily towards their biggest customer – the business – making technology as well as doing business much more competitive.   The IBM Personal Computer AT (AT stood for “Advanced Technology”) was IBM’s flagship computer on the market in 1984 packing a full 6MHz processing power and Intel processor, making it the first computer that could compete with counting to ten using your hands.

My main beef with this type of peripheral is that when something breaks, the whole thing stops serving its purpose.  Let’s say the printer breaks, which they are notoriously popular for doing.  The screen goes black – good luck replacing it since you can’t just buy a new screen, your whole video writer machine is freaking connected to everything else.

I suppose you put the file to disc and open it to print on your buddy’s computer.  OH WAIT!  PC’s were horribly incompatible in the 1980′s and 1990′s, with every hardware and software company is clamouring to make their way the “standard”.  Since everyone else’s standards were crap, you had to use THEIR computer to get it to do anything you wanted it to do.

It looks like in the end the consumers demanded more from their technology than just Video Writing.  There’s probably a Steve Ballmer commercial for that somewhere…