Okay, when I posted about the television personalities that have pitched computers, I didn't think that this would become a series. Yet, when I saw a comment from reader ThomasD, I had to prep another one because, frankly, this one is weird.
The ad features the fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, and then-current companion Romana, played by Lalla Ward, which puts the commercial sometime around 1980. The Prime automated office system seems to be a part of Prime Computer, a Massachusetts-based company that produced microcomputers from 1972 until 1992. According to the wonderful world of Wikipedia, the office automaton system that Who and Romana talk about featured electronic mail that functioned between Prime networks only and word processing on dumb terminals.
This is a very unusual ad. Even for the Doctor Who episodes of the era, the writing on this commercial was sub-par. Plus, why would the doctor need a rigid computer system like this when the systems on the TARDIS could probably handle billions of processes trillions of nanoseconds faster. Coming from such an advanced race as the Time Lords you would think that they would have some form of word processing! Unless, they were all using Windows. Ohhh, the horror!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-25-2008 @ 2:18PM
Boomstick said...
Clever Prime!
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8-25-2008 @ 2:36PM
Eric J. said...
Well, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were married for a time, I believe, which may explain how they were acting in this commercial.
And the Tardis always had terrible graphics.
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