Before the year 2000, Super Bowl commercials from tech companies offered millions of viewers their first glimpses of the future. Gizmodo watched dozens of videos from the 1980s and ‘90s to find the most iconic Super Bowl commercials from the early tech industry.
Fax machines, internet connections, and Nokia phones may sound outdated now, but they used to be the cutting edge. These ads are far different from the tech commercials you’ll see in this year’s Super Bowl. We had to pull out our encyclopedias just to figure out what some of these companies were selling.
Tech dominates Super Bowl commercials nowadays, but these early ads remind us why we get excited about NFL timeouts in the first place. These ads sold the future, and looking back is a great way to measure just how far we’ve come.
