Technology

For its 25th anniversary, Discover explored scientific progress as it had appeared on our editorial pages. This month, on the magazine's 26th anniversary, we examine another story of progress—one told through Discover's ads.

A clean-cut man sits beside a clunky old computer, a cigarette in his hand. Draped over the monitor is a woman swathed in a thick fur coat and a dress hitched several inches above her knees, smiling adoringly at the smoker as he nuzzles her foot with his shoe. "He likes hardware," says the advertisement for Benson & Hedges cigarettes. "She's into softwear."

Dripping with Freudian innuendo, the advertisement seems mired in a bygone age—the 1950s, perhaps—when men took charge of machines, women wore (and were) fluff, and smoking was sophisticated. Yet this cigarette ad appears in—egad—a modern science magazine: the December 1985 issue of Discover. Only the computer hints at the ad's real vintage. No Internet icons, windows, or colorful graphics crowd the black screen, just mysterious long strings of green zeros.

To glance back over 26 years' worth of Discover ads is to glimpse a lost world of electric typewriters, Polaroid cameras, Atari video games, and smokers, smokers galore. It is a slide show of the past that tells us as much as—if not more than—the articles themselves about the rapid evolution of technology, social mores, and attitudes toward health. From the arrival of e-mail to the advent of Viagra and the Prius hybrid car, the ads unfold a fascinating tour of two and a half decades of science, medicine, and environmental change.

Flick open the premier (October 1980) issue of Discover—now so rare it's kept in a locked drawer in our editorial offices—and one is offered "the first personal computer for under $200," the Sinclair ZX80, which billed itself as "a complete, powerful, full-function computer," with one kilobyte of user memory. Today that memory would be maxed out by a single e-mail message. (By contrast, a 2006 PC may have one gigabyte of memory on its hard drive—one million times that of a ZX80.) "You simply take it out of the box, connect it to your TV, and turn it on," gabs the ad. "Within a week, you'll be writing complex programs with confidence." Never mind blogging or music downloads: In 1980, when home computers were so rare that no reliable ownership statistics exist, ZX80 users wrote their own programs in BASIC code—mostly for simple games like Lunar Lander and Blackjack, and stored them on cassette tapes.

But we can't all be early adopters. Despite the popularity of the ZX80—the company purportedly sold 100,000 of them worldwide that year—the readers of Discover were evidently still clacking away on typewriters in 1981. That's when Smith-Corona wedged its electric Coronet XL under a Christmas tree in the December issue, touting its "brand-new Lift-Rite" correction system "that actually lifts mistakes clean off the page!" If the ads were reaching a receptive audience, then subscribers were also playing Space Invaders and Missile Command on their Atari systems, proudly recording up to six full hours on a single cassette with their RCA Convertible SelectaVision VCRs and snapping away with the four-inch-wide Polaroid OneStep, "the world's simplest camera," to which the manufacturer had recently added the "amazing, detachable Q-light strobe."

Like home computers, cell phones in the early 1980s were an alien notion to most Americans. (The first commercially available mobile phone in the United States, the brick-size Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was launched in 1983.) In October 1980, the farthest a Discover reader could hope to rove from the house with a telephone was 300 feet, with the aid of the Phone Ranger, a boxy portable push-button telephone with a rechargeable battery whose base unit plugged into a house jack. The satisfied user pictured in the ad perches the phone precariously on a rock, stretches the curly wire taut, and boasts into the receiver that he can "groom Laird, my Palomino gelding, with one hand and call my broker with the other."

From that point on, everything grew smaller, sleeker, and faster: Tiny digital cameras replaced ancestral Polaroids, Zip disks cast out floppies, DVDs thrust aside videotape, and ever-slimmer cell phones and Palm Pilots proliferated. In the year 2000, Sony publicized its 64-megabyte Memory Stick, which could store digital images, video and digital music files, and—if its oddly elegant ad campaign could be believed—slotted directly into the back of a man's head.