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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

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Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#21

Post by noisy_boy »

lidavidm wrote: post #17
noisy_boy wrote: post #15

> debinding When I was in school, there was a binding shop nearby which had a huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine, only shallower, that just sliced through thick books like butter. They stuck the book in a vice grip, turned a wheel which brought that beautiful sharp heavy blade down on the hopeless book stuck in the grip below and the paper shavings just blossomed out of the other side as the blade…

Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older) Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't want to damage the pages, even if the damage se…

> That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads.

A very good point

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#22

Post by textfiles »

noisy_boy wrote: post #21
lidavidm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older) Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't want to damage the pages, even if the damage se…

> That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. A very good point

Also, people have already contributed thousands for this project, asking for a cutty-cutty machine is a bit much, especially when I'm really getting good with the heat gun.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#23

Post by _yb2s »

lr4444lr wrote: post #8

Considering the prices adjusted for inflation, and how little computers could do out of the box beyond the business applications they were designed for in that era, it was really quite an expensive hobby to be a hacker!

I can't even wrap my head around some of these prices... One of those pages for "February 1986" has an ad for "diskettes" box of 10 priced between $1195 and $2995. Are these what I think they are, regular floppy disks for almost $300 each?

Edit: that must have been a typo, I see prices in the same issue of about $1/disk.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#24

Post by zakki »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #18
mindcrime wrote: post #14

This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…

I think what a lot of younger people also don’t realize is how gigantic a single issue of computer shopper was. They were as thick as phone books with thin weight pages. I remember multiple issues being well into the thousands of pages.

I don’t think younger people understand your description of how thick Computer Shopper was. Because most likely they don’t know how thick is a phone book ;D

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#25

Post by bane »

CSSer wrote: post #16
noisy_boy wrote: post #15

> debinding When I was in school, there was a binding shop nearby which had a huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine, only shallower, that just sliced through thick books like butter. They stuck the book in a vice grip, turned a wheel which brought that beautiful sharp heavy blade down on the hopeless book stuck in the grip below and the paper shavings just blossomed out of the other side as the blade…

Something like this? https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e

Probably more like one of these, a hydraulic guillotine cutter.

https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4

https://youtu.be/BvLk6-OugIc

These will easily take a hand off so most of the machines designed after the mid-80s required the operator to press two buttons as a safety to cut and a pedal to initiate the clamp. The older ones from the 70s just required a push on a pair of foot pedals, or a pedal and a single button -- which was obviously stupid. Once the safer machines came around we got those.

I used to operate one as a kid in middle/high school before I went off to college. You can fit measure to sub-mm precision before clamping and making the cut. It was a really beautiful thing to see it cleave the edges off of several inches of paper like a hot knife cutting through room temperature butter. A real shame filling up bins and bins and bins of cuttings to toss in the trash (this was before recycling was a common thing).

Changing the blades was quite the ordeal and you had to do it frequency to send off for regrinding. At least on the machines we had. They're basically 20+lb razer blades.

Source: I grew up in a family printing business and we had machines like this to cut the margins and printer marks off of the edges of fresh printed material to help get it ready for binding or delivery. Almost every printed page goes through something like this.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#26

Post by dec0dedab0de »

mindcrime wrote: post #14

This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…

...and "beige box" off a COCOT...

I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to call)

A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the one end. You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#27

Post by mindcrime »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #26
mindcrime wrote: post #14

This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…

...and "beige box" off a COCOT... I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to call) A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the one end. You…

I definitely mean "beige box." Red boxes were (mainly?) for telephone company phones that would recognize the coin tones. Those phones had a different line "class of service" at the switch end and the critical point is that red-boxing was the only way (post blue-box era anyway) to get free calls off of them. Well, at least that I knew of. But a COCOT had all the "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the line was a normal line, so if you clipped in at the demarc box, "upstream" of the actual phone, you were on a plain old phone line (with long-distance service) that you could use to your heart's content. And by the time frame I'm talking about, there weren't a lot of the red-box'able telephone company payphones around in our area.

If some COCOT's were also susceptible to red-boxing, that's something we never discovered. To be fair though, it never even occurred to me to check. I just had it burned into my brain at some point that red-boxing was for telco phones and not COCOT's.[1] In hindsight, that was quite possibly folklore that was wrong.

You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

Yep. It just worked out that a convenience store in the middle of nowhere with a COCOT out in the parking lot was a good scenario for doing this kind of thing without getting caught. Or so I'm told... :-)

[1]: https://www.tech-faq.com/red-box.html

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#28

Post by ISL »

textfiles wrote: post #22
noisy_boy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. A very good point

Also, people have already contributed thousands for this project, asking for a cutty-cutty machine is a bit much, especially when I'm really getting good with the heat gun.

Scientists routinely request more grant money for research whose difficulty exceeds initial estimates. You're already doing an incredible thing; it is okay to ask for more assistance.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#29

Post by bane »

mindcrime wrote: post #14

This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…

I've said it before, The IA is a crown jewel of the internet. But now I'll add "and God Bless Jason Scott".

This might be one of the most important historical pricing repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's tracking the emergence and transition between technologies, correlation against production yield information, corporate histories...this could be a backbone all other North American computer history could be hung off of.

It's a time long gone, but 2009 wasn't that long ago, and reaching from the beginning of personal computing to then is an amazing thing.

edit: wow, and I mean wow the results look great https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

edit2: WHAT, THEY'RE ALSO OCR'd???!?!?! Holy Fuck

edit3: if you don't, you should listen to Jason's podcast, it really helps get into the mind of an amazing human https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#30

Post by function_seven »

zakki wrote: post #24
shiftpgdn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what a lot of younger people also don’t realize is how gigantic a single issue of computer shopper was. They were as thick as phone books with thin weight pages. I remember multiple issues being well into the thousands of pages.

I don’t think younger people understand your description of how thick Computer Shopper was. Because most likely they don’t know how thick is a phone book ;D

For those that don't know, a phone book was often about twice as thick as a Thomas Guide.

That should help.

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