Source: Computer Fun – April 1984
This ad is from the April 1984 issue of Computer Fun. It is by a company called Protecto Enterprises and is for various Commodore 64 (more power than an Apple II at half the price) and VIC-20 (a real computer at the price of a toy) hardware and software.
I remember seeing ads by this company a few years later when I started buying Commodore related magazines but I don’t remember them being this misleading. $99.50 would have been an incredibly good price for a Commodore 64 in 1984 but you have to really pay attenting to the asterix in this case. The REAL price is $199.50 and then they are subtracting the value of some coupons they are going to give you for discounted software. The deal for the disk drive is much the same. The real price isn’t $139, it’s $239. I seriously doubt the included coupons would have added that kind of value for most people and it wouldn’t surprise me if you could find the software at the discounted rate or below somewhere else anyway. It looks like the VIC-20 may have actually been the $69.50 price that is advertised here but I don’t think they were even making them anymore by this point so they were closeouts anyway.
The way they advertise memory is misleading as well. The Commodore 64 is an 84K computer according to Protecto. Given that the Commodore 64 only had 64K of RAM, I assume they are summing the RAM and ROM to get the advertised amount. They don’t even bother to tell you the brand of some of the hardware and software they are selling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “TRACTION FRICTION PRINTER” advertised before. I’m not even sure what it is exactly and they don’t bother to put the model or the brand in the ad.
Here’s the text in the ad rationalizing the advertised $99.50 price for the Commodore 64:
“You pay only $199.50 when you order the powerful 84K COMMODORE 64 COMPUTER! LESS the value of the SPECIAL SOFTWARE COUPON we pack with your computer that allows you to SAVE OVER $100 off software sale prices!! With only $100 of savings applied, your net computer cost is $99.50!!”
Basically the same text is used to describe the disk drive and printer deals.
