Dick

In New Zealand and Australia you can buy electric appliances from a shop called Dick Smith.  Dick is Australian (ahem).  Here is what the signs look like in 2012.

I show you this purely so that I can tell you a story.  I was once at a really fantastic talk about the Treaty of Waitangi by Moana Jackson (I don’t use the word fantastic lightly when I talk about the Treaty of Waitangi… talks about the Treaty of Waitangi usually deserve the adjectives boring, pointless, and ignorant).  Anyway, he told us about when his daughter was learning to read, and they drove past a Dick Smith store and she said she could read the sign outside the shop.  “What does it say?” asked Moana.  “Dick Head Smith,” his daughter announced.

Here is Dick (just so you know, yes I am going to be using his first name as much as possible in this post) in 1982,

As you can see, he is wearing the super on trend white suit of the early 80s, which puts him on the same fashion page as Simon Le Bon.  I also note that heavy, black plastic frames have come back in for glasses.

Here’s what DICK was trying to sell us in 1982:

Why, Dick, why?  Why do I need the time twice? 

Ok, one at a time:

• A pen/watch.  I can remember thinking this was cool, before I realised it was pointless.  We were in the pioneering age when clocks went digital and people thought they could make anything modern by putting a clock in it.  Also, “a watch in the handle”… do pens have handles?  Actually, what do pens have?  Stems? Shafts?
• Advanced metal detector.  Did anyone fall for this?  Weekend gold hunting.  Sure, because as we all know, gold is generally found lying around in fields and buried in beaches.  If only all those idiots panning for gold in river beds in the 1860s had known.
• The $460 answering machine.  Love the phone.  Not using it (it’s like so SLOW to dial a number), but looking at it.  In New Zealand you have to dial 111 in an emergency.  By the time you had done this on a phone like the one above the emergency was usually over.  There must have been a lot more calls like this to the emergency call centre in NZ in the 80s:

Operator: Which service do you require?

Caller: You know what, my house has pretty much burned down so let’s just forget it.

As for calling the police because there was an intruder in the house.  Well, you could totally forget that. 

Scene: interior, bedroom, night

Sound of breaking glass off stage.  We see a woman sit up in bed.  She grabs the phone by her bed.  She lifts receiver and begins to dial 111.  After dialing first 1 she sits and waits for the plastic dial to slowly click back to its starting position.

Burglar (off stage): I can, like, totally hear you dialing the police from the other side of the house.

Woman: No I’m not.  (She noisily dials the second 1)

Burglar: Just so you know, I have already stolen your TV.

Woman: Ok.

Burglar: And your oven and fridge.

Woman: Ok.  (Dial returns to starting position, she begins to dial third 1)

Burglar: Well, I’ll be shooting off I guess.

Woman: Yep.

Burglar: Catch you later.

DICK has been in the papers recently.  He sold his company to Woolworths in the early 80s.  Seems that Woolworths are now selling up.  They have been shedding 30-40 stores a year for a few years and now are looking to close 100 more to make it a more attractive prospect for buyers.  DICK is not happy.

the Woolworths’ decision was a sign Australia was moving closer to the point when everything would be foreign-owned….  he believed selling it to a foreign investor would mean “further destruction of Australia”.

“This is just continuing where all the wealth is going overseas and damaging our country,” he said.  The Buy Australian campaigner believed the local market was not big enough to provide sustained profits for companies in an increasingly globalised world.  “When you want endless growth only the biggest survive,” Mr Smith said. “Little Australia won’t have any ownership at all.”

Really?  I have three points DICK. 

Firstly, you sold your own company to a foreign business 30 years ago. 

Secondly, your business has nothing to do with Buy Australian Made but is about importing foreign designed and made goods. 

Thirdly, I take it this means that New Zealanders shouldn’t go to your stores because in New Zealand your stores are an example of an attempt at “endless growth” of which “little [NZ] has no ownership at all.”

Dick.

Smile confidently: it’s the future

or D.  Laugh hysterically and say, “you may as well ask a monkey”?

If you were the kind of person who would c) smile confidently in 1982 it was undoubtedly because you knew you would be able to ask the “girls” in the office to do the financial report for you, and not because you had one of these bad boys.

The ad finishes: “Here’s the nicest part… you can pay it off over 2,3 or 5 years for as little as $82.56 per week”.  Presumably this is the five year deal.  So 5 x 52 = 260, 260 x $82.56 = more than $20,000 (even if it is the two year plan it is over $8,000).  I hope the financial report factors this into the projected bankruptcy of the business.

Perhaps a computer for the home then?

Imagine pitching your skills against your own Space Invaders – in colour and with sound effects!

Imagine.

With 16k bytes fitted.

The size of the file used for this picture of the Atari 400 in this post is 2.35MB.

Whenever I see these old computer ads I always think: where’s the monitor?  But of course they didn’t come with one because you plugged them into your TV.  My mother bought us a Commodore 64 in the 80s so that we wouldn’t fall behind in the imaginary race to… um, some place where having a computer was really important. 

It was exciting pulling the 64 out of the box, and stressful setting it up.  For a while it looked like it wasn’t going to work, and then we rearranged some cords at the back and bam, our perfectly good TV was now a large box for typing words into for no real reason.

We tried to think of things we could do with it.  I suggested putting recipes on it.  My mum half-heartedly agreed that you could do this.  Why you would want to type all of your recipes into a computer that could only be accessed in the living room when you had disconnected the TV and plugged the computer in is beyond me.  Much handier to have your recipes in a book in the actual kitchen.

My mother suggested I could do my homework on it, but we didn’t have a printer and I couldn’t type so this would have been like slowly assembling my homework in moveable type and then carrying the printer’s plate to school.

Let’s be honest, most people who actually used their computers used them to play games, and the computer companies knew it.  Sure, the Atari ad talks about educational stuff, but it doesn’t actually mention any specifics.  The only specific thing it mentions is Space Invaders.  They have to mention other vague stuff (“expand your families world”), because if they’d said “spend $1200 on Space Invaders” parents then would’ve gone “yeah, right” (nowadays they’ve mostly been worn down).

Problem is some crucial parts of my man DNA have been damaged.  I don’t have the male video gaming DNA (or the car DNA), which rendered the 80s computer totally and utterly useless to me.  The computer sat in its box for a bit, and then we sold it.  The man who bought it seemed delighted.  He had young kids.  He probably thought he was expanding his family’s world.  He probably told his wife “this’ll be great honey, you can put all your recipes on it, and little Timmy can do his homework”.

I hope he liked playing computer games.

Keeping up with a Commodore?  Again with this race thing. 

“In a world of fun and fantasy” (cue: hot girls exploding out of water slide)

“Wouldn’t it be great to be locked

inside of your room

(that always smells of socks)

trying to learn BASIC so that you can plot

a slightly wonky square?”

No.  No it wouldn’t.  Get back to me when you invent the internet.