Kids fail in College, but not with a Commodore Home Computer

You save and save to send little Jimmy off to college. He was an honors student and captain of the varsity bowling team. Everything seemed perfect on paper. So why did little Jimmy fail during the first semester? Probably because you were doing all that figuring on paper and now Jimbo has no computer skills and in 1983, it means he just can’t compete.

I am not sure how accurate that is exactly. The majority of school work in 1983 was still done by hand, or at best, on an electric typewriter. But as we see here, Commodore is in the vanguard of the lucrative fear-based school of tech advertising. Now, it might seem funny to lump your kid’s college education in with security or backup fears, but it makes a ton of sense when you consider just how much people are willing to spend on education. And if a Commodore Computer, which is only a couple of hundred bucks at most (less for a Vic), can give your kid an advantage, why not give it a shot.

That is why the scene at the end of the ad is not at college, but at a much younger child’s birthday party. This was the time a good parent should have been considering getting their kid a computer, and guess what, the parents in this particular advertisement got their little one a C64. We can only assume that in a couple of years when this one gets sent away to some pricey university that they won’t be returning. No, these parents will see straight A+s on all of her report cards, and weekly letters were written on their wise investment. A double plus for them for good parenting.

Commodore does it all…