|
|
|
I'm a bit of a history nut and whenever I'm reading my
100+ year old copies of the Strand Magazine , in which Sherlock Holmes made his
first appearance, I confess that often I'm just as entertained and intrigued by
the ads from that time, as by the editorial.
Pills and potions which
promise miracle cures... Handy gadgets which save you hours of time.... I
suppose the reason that many of these products aren't around any more is that
the claims were perhaps a bit too spurious. But they offered hope in an age
where your lawyers didn't have to prove everything you said in your ads.
As
an entertainment, and perhaps inspiration to future chroniclers of the Sun
server market, I thought it might be interesting to collect here some banner
ads which appeared in our web publication before January 1, 2000.
Although
we started selling selling web advertising in 1996, I wasn't a great fan of
banner ads in those days. So it wasn't till 1998 I relented to the pressure to
let them appear on the SPARC
Product Directory web site.
If any readers have any banner ads from
before that time, which appeared from their company, then send me an email with
the approximate vintage and where it appeared, and I'll see if I can add it
here. |
|
| 1998 |
|
 |
This was one of the first banner
ads we ran in 1998 from EIS. They later changed their name to StarBox
Netsystems, and then kind of disappeared. |
|
 |
This was the 2nd banner ad we
ran in 1998. |
|
 |
In 1998 (and before) Themis were
focused on the embedded SPARC market, and they still are today. |
|
 |
UK Sun VARs were also running
banner ads in 1998. This company was later acquired by a company called Torex
Services. |
|
 |
Antares was the first
manufacturer of 3rd party SBus cards. |
|
| 1999 |
|
 |
In 1999, banner ads didn't look
much different. Then, as now, advertisers sometimes got the size slightly wrong. |
|
 |
In 1999, SPARC workstations
were still hot products. |
|
 |
Storage products too, were
starting to get hot. Interesting to see how prices have changed. |
|
 |
Partnerships have always been
important in the Sun market. |
|
 |
SPARC International ran this
banner in October 1999. |
|
 |
The first SPARC systems in 1987
had been VME based. This ad was targeting owners of legacy systems who wanted to
upgrade to faster processors. |
|
 |
This company was acquired by Verio. |
|
 |
Then, as now, the environment was a good thing to put into
an ad. Cycle was acquired by Tapdole. Cycle's founder later did a management
buyout. |
|
 |
Some Sun VARs are older than Sun itself. |
|
 |
Tatung started its involvement
with SPARC technology in 1988 and actively promoted its SPARC workstations and
servers upto December 2001. |
|
 |
CCNY was an advertiser of ours
for many years. Price and service have always been important in the Sun market. | |
 |
| SPARC History |
| Spellabyte and
Terrorbyte loved sitting around the campfire, discussing the good old days of
SPARC computing. | |
| . |
|
| . |
 |
Sanitization
Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives - article by Intelligent Computer
Solutions
Removing the data on old unwanted disk drives has
become a concern for all users. Earlier this year
Pointsec found that
they were able to read 7 out of 10 hard-drives bought over the Internet
at auctions such as eBay, for less than the cost of a McDonald's meal, all of
which had "supposedly" been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted".
This article reviews the various methods available to sanitize hard disks along
with the advantages and disadvantages in each case....read the article,
...Intelligent Computer
Solutions profile,
disk sanitizers | |
| . |
Lessons
for Banner Ad Designers?
Students of web marketing can learn a lot
by stepping back from the immediate process of trying to get leads and business
in internet time.
If you click on the banner ads (shown on the left)
they won't take you anywhere, because I removed the links, and because many of
the web sites no longer exist.
But what can you learn about the
companies and products?
A good banner ad will give you information
about how to contact the company even before you click. In many cases it may
already be a company you know from previous advertising or because you are
already a customer.
If the banner ad doesn't give you a picture of what
is happening with that company, or their advertised promotion, then the link to
the web site is irrelevant. There's a lot more to banner ads than the click. | |
|
- Customers
Search Differently - customers (who want to find suppliers and buy stuff)
search differently to marketers (who want to promote their companies and sell
stuff). That's why most search marketing misses the best targets.
- Press Release Errors
I see every day - Every month I have to disregard thousands of press
releases, which vendors have paid good money to their agencies to write and
distribute. Here are some of the common reasons why.
- The Golden Keys of
E-Commerce - Domain names are no longer small issues to be handled by the
booming logo-centric-slogan-happy-agencies or web-tech-teams.
- Fighting
Linkrot - this article, written by web usability sage Jakob Nielsen, is
just as relevant today as it was back in 1998 when he first wrote it. The
importance of keeping incoming links to your website forever live - isn't
understood by most web designers. That means website owners can lose the
benefits of years of search-engine marketing in a single afternoon when they
roll out a new design which trashes all their old landing pages.
- Think of Web Ads
as Signposts - they can lead the right people to your destination. But give
them a credible message so that the brain follows the mouse click for sound
business reasons. Ideally the ad should also signal to the wrong type of
customer they can filter themselves out at this point and not waste their
time and yours by following this path.
| | |
