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Latest Content: Promotional Material

In the competitive 1980s computer retail industry, corporate swag helped to boost sales by promoting immediate brand recognition and creating a memorable visual identity that could leave customers an important first impression. Button pins, proudly worn by enthusiastic sales staff on their lapels or pocket protectors, served as miniature billboards that sparked customer conversations, reinforced or created brand loyalty, and turned everyday interactions into subtle marketing opportunities for brands like Leading Edge Computers. Even small, affordable accessories could make important impressions and deliver returns when personal computing was exploding in popularity and differentiation was the key element in gaining and keeping a customer base.
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Upcoming Content: Promotional Material

Companies use official letterheads to communicate with outside parties, partly to convey the official veracity of the document as well as a subtle self‐;promotion in their communications vectors. These documents are blank templates onto which an employee can populate a letter to their audiences. Featured here is an official Leading Edge Products letterhead. This letter came from a collection of documents and hardware from a user who had bought into the Model D environment in the early 1980s, so it can be surmised that this letterhead was the official letterhead of that time‐period.

Upcoming Content: Game

Scrapyard Rescue is a vintage Leading Edge Computer‐themed side scrolling platformer game consisting of five levels that get progressively more challenging. LE Bot needs your help in navigating about the scrapyard. you see, LE Bot accidentally threw out a priceless computer display. He thought it was junk but Curator Bot was about to start a restoration project on the computer system. LE Bot must gather up the missing keyboard, monitor, mouse, computer, and processor. Help LE Bot navigate through the increasingly difficult levels and collect the pieces while avoiding or defeating enemies made up of other discarded electronics. Their being discarded has driven them all to madness, so watch out!

Upcoming Content: Document

Windows was not the first operating system (OS) to offer a graphical user interface (GUI), but it was one of the first operating systems many users did use that came with a GUI. Command line based operating systems were often accompanied by encyclopedic sized user guides to train a new user on the plethora of commands that would need to be known or at least user−acquainted to effectively run a computer with such an operating environment. Leading Edge issued a 195 page manual to accompany their computers that were preloaded with Windows 3.1 . The manual is much smaller than a MS−DOS 5.0 manual of a couple of years earlier containing 668 pages. The Leading Edge Windows 3.1 manual focuses on five main parts of the OS: Essential Operations, Standard Applications, Customization and Optimization, Desktop Applications, and Games. The manual then contains four appendices: Installing Windows, Fundamental Keys, Memory and Settings, and a Glossary.