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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

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Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#31

Post by textfiles »

bane wrote: post #29
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, correla…

finger guns

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#32

Post by coverband »

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.

So many pages were the same unchanged ads in the Shopper every month. Can't you add in some prefiltering for those to reduce the number of pages actually needed to scan? (Sorry for hijacking the thread...)

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#34

Post by UncleOxidant »

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.

Once Computer Shopper became huge phone-book-sized things I quit buying them because I just didn't have the room or the time - fortunately our college library subscribed and I could peruse it there, but generally I'd read Byte, Creative Computing or Dr. Dobb's Journal instead. I recall when CS was kind of a newspaper prior to being a bound magazine format.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#35

Post by mindcrime »

function_seven wrote: post #30
zakki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And a Thomas Guide was about as thick as 8 or 9 J.C. Whitney catalogs.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#36

Post by intrasight »

analog31 wrote: post #7

What a wonderful resource. When I was in grad school, somebody would buy the latest Computer Shopper and it would be passed around as needed. You really didn't need a brand new copy, so the old ones were passed around too. Sometimes it just gave you an idea of what could be built, and what kind of planning was needed. And payment / shipment were nontrivial in those days.

Info didn't age as fast then. The same products were being sold, and for about the same price, for MANY months. And there just weren't very many products. A full-page ad in a pretty large font could list every product that existed in the consumer space.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#37

Post by dhosek »

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…

Back in the 90s, my brother actually had a subscription to Computer Shopper (he had a side hustle building PCs for entertainment industry folks). I only ever bought it if I was planning on building something which was rare because computers were expensive back then. The last PC I built literally did not have two components from the same vendor. To be honest, I don’t miss those days. Say what you like about the “Apple tax,” it’s very nice to have one company who will take responsibility for things not working and my experience, at least, has been that they stand behind their products (at least as long as they’re under AppleCare).

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#38

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

_yb2s wrote: post #23
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.

I saw that, too. They are missing a decimal point. 11.95 and 29.95.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#39

Post by russellbeattie »

When I was in college in 1991, I used to get Computer Shopper and spend hours scouring it for a laptop (not a common thing then). I wanted one so bad, but was sooo broke you can't even imagine. There were always random resellers getting rid of old laptops and I'd spend hours trying to figure out which one I might get. "That 286 with the flip-up half-screen black and white liquid crystal display is relatively cheap... but so clunky. Maybe I should save up for a 386? But all the affordable ones have horrible passive LCD screens that ghost. Wait... maybe if I sell a kidney..."

I never ended up ordering one, but I remember fondly the hours of dreaming about it.

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