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“Bring your daydreams to reality,” Integrix wrote of a hellspawn workstation chaperoned by Pierrot clowns.
I M A G I N E, reads a too-small tagline beneath a monitor birthing fire-wielding skeletons.
Did anyone care that the jesters’ eyelines didn’t line up or that the exposure of the lava didn’t match the sky? It was 1996 and half the reason marketing teams were excited about design software was the included libraries of 3D images.
Bad ads, in my experience, almost always come with whackadoodle company histories. Sadly, that was not the case with Integrix. The $13,995 price tag was a little surprising since my relatively low-income family was able to swing a hand-me-down PC by the mid-90s, but five-figure machines haven’t been uncommon as I’ve waded through ads like these. And, to be fair, these models were marketed as high-end SPARC OEMs.
Scandalous history or not, Integrix’s clipart casseroles are a breath of fresh air compared to AI ads from Coca-Cola and others.
The unmirrored and misaligned reflections, the low-res magical floating cliff, a random misshapen bubble in the distance–these are not products of nascent image editing software. One hundred pages before this is a beautiful spread of a cyclist racing down the circuitry of a Pentium OverDrive!
No one seemed to care too much that one monitor displayed video feedback while the other showed a…solar eclipse? The workstation that was “self-contained within a standard pizza box” (Integrix’s words, not mine) was well reviewed by benchmarkers like Neal Nelson and Associates who said the “SWS5, a high-speed SPARCstation 5 clone, earned the highest rating of the five computers reviewed for its expandability, application availability, solid architecture, and well-rounded performance.”
And, according to Integrix’s Innovation page, the SWS2+ SPARCstation won a Best Product award from Advanced Systems in 1993.
At least, if you could make it past their mixed metaphors and meaningless copywriting.
“Now you can…” fish for planets? “Open your mind…” to casting a wider and more muddled net into cyberspace? Surely they had some surfing-related clip art. Whatever, at least they learned alter the reflections a tad.
A few months after running this ad, the company bought a 50,000-square-foot facility. So layering a bunch of random crap from their Adobe library didn’t seem to hurt sales. Integrix’s president told the LA Times that “the company’s growth has almost doubled over the last two years.”
And you can verify as much by visiting the Wayback Machine’s 1996 capture of their website, complete with a waterfall spilling out of a monitor sitting on top of a pocketwatch, which is itself lying on a desert floor rimmed by mountains:
The graphic between those paragraphs says “Intro” in case, oh I don’t know, you found the sideways and elongated font hard to read. At least the cockeyed infinity symbol isn’t a spinning GIF…like it is on an older version of their homepage.
My favorite of their spaghetti-on-the-wall approach, though, is the Corporate Address page:
The longer I stare at this the harder it is for me to pick which element is my favorite.
“Alliances with other venders [sic] are very important to get better solutions in a timely manner,” SBus Expansion Engineer Jeff Zheng wrote on the site’s SPARC solutions page.
A couple of years later and Integrix partnered with InterNet to distribute their “desktop server lines and the RAID storage solutions,” and their ads, while still heavily leaning on non-product nonsense, got a bit more tame:
Aside from a bit of wonky font sizing in “That’s reliability” (below the bullet list) and a server in a tire-shaped cryogenic chamber, this is about as close to average 90s tech ads as you get.
And then Integrix just sort of vanished. The company’s president, Jason Lo, lists his tenure as Oct ‘90 – Dec ‘01 on his LinkedIn profile, which matches the Wayback Machine’s last capture of the company’s site.
Today, in 2026, a company using the Integrix name sells gun scopes for “discerning marksmen, hunters, and tactical shooters” that sell anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. Bring back the clowns and flaming demons, I say!
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