Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

ascii.textfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 153 posts

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#121

Post by VincentEvans »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #104
VincentEvans wrote: post #86

What is the value of digitizing computer shopper?

Apart from nostalgia, it contains a staggering amount of information about historical PC pricing and hardware availability that (to my knowledge) isn't really documented anywhere else. Sure, Wikipedia can tell you the official launch date of the Intel Pentium, but Computer Shopper can tell you when the price actually dropped to something reasonable, when cheap motherboards for it started pouring out of no-name manufa…

Thanks for the genuine answer.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#122

Post by canadianfella »

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…

[dead]

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#123

Post by gwern »

rbanffy wrote: post #109
modernerd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydraulic drive paper cutters are great for high-volume print finishing (I used several in print production for about two years), but I’d be wary of them for this use case: - Waste is high. To trim off a spine, you likely have to take more of the margin than you’d like (if you trim too close to the edge of a glued spine, the risk is higher that you may bludgeon the stack of pages under pressure instead of cutting it)…

What if instead of cutting, we sanded them? The pressure on the surfaces would be smaller and it could remove just enough to debind the volume.

I briefly experiment with that for books before switching to a guillotine. It was slower, and made a mess. Even when I thought all the dust/grit was gone, some snuck into the scans anyway. For softer lower-quality aged acid-attacked newsprint-style magazines like this, I imagine the mess would be even worse.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#124

Post by dublin »

sangnoir wrote: post #116
dhosek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Say what you like about the “Apple tax,” it’s very nice to have one company who will take responsibility for things not working Where's the fun in that? Building your own PC is a thrill - budgeting, chosing components, excitedly waiting for each to arrive or picking them from shelf, assembling everything and then pressing the power button to power everything up for the first time. Followed by your heart sinking whe…

The excitement of those old days is still very much alive in the Raspberry Pi community. I just configured a new PiBox server to do some fairly serious work, including serving as the archive NAS for two ne startups. (It's more than capable of doing that work - it has more CPU power, more RAM, and more storage than Chevron's Crays had when I worked there in the '90s!)

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#125

Post by dublin »

scott1701 wrote: post #118
bane wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can just smell the pages as you flip through.

This is a perfect example of how our technologies have let us down - Computer Shopper and the like (including newspapers) were useful precisely because they could be quickly browsed and flipped through.

That's not really possible with the wretched things we call "browsers" today - Heck, even with a high-bandwidth connection and a nice 4K screen to display it, I still can't nearly as readily flip through pages of the IA Computer Shopper scans as I could through the actual physical media. Browsing, along with its attendant and deliberate page-turning to move on to something new, have been replaced by endless scrolling of sameness. The Ads are all dynamic, so even though they're the things that catch your eye the most, they're not usable as navigation context markers anymore - note how different all the ads were, and how the uniqueness page layout became something a litlte bit memorable, so you could more easily flip back to re-find something you'd read a few dozen pages back.

Browsing is an excellent quick, easy way to MAKE CONNECTIONS between lots of different data coming from lots of different sources. That sort of thing created much more well-rounded, smarter people, and society is poorer for having moved to overly structured media. (And ads are media, too (heck they're nearly all of Computer Shopper) - just try going back to find an ad you saw on a site last week!) Static location context matters - humans are wired to think in terms of physical relativity, and our UIs give that up only at great cost...

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#126

Post by dublin »

gumby wrote: post #114

The author is both barking mad and performing a very important service. Ephemera like the Comouter Shopper will be valuable to some historians in the future, and by its very nature this is something that needs to be preserved while it’s just an amusement. the author is also self aware (cf the Byte episode) which is unusual. I am fascinated that the computer shopper never made the transition to the web. They could hav…

There was a 2 decade gap between Computer Shopper's desire to go digital (they did create a fairly useless CD version later) and the ability of networks and browsers to even poorly render digital content. Even flipping pages today at the archive.org link isn't nearly as speedy as flipping real pages...

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#128

Post by dublin »

russellbeattie wrote: post #39

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...…

I drooled over the DG/One and the Kaypro 2000 - two of the very first true "laptop" computers. (No, the GriD doesn't count - it had to be plugged in!)

Way out of my budget, so I settled for a surplus, but new Commodore SX-64 luggable, with a fancy built-in 5-inch COLOR screen! Did the usual Commodore stuff on it, then got GEOS (made a C-64 a reasonable facsimile of a Macintosh - really) and used it to write all my final college papers and even my first resume. I still have it (in its original packing) up in a closet - need to pull it down sometime and figure out why the video sync doesn't work...

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#129

Post by PAPPPmAc »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #112

This is an awesome project! Library/archive/historical-preservation people these days, for a while now, generally don't use "scanners" to digitize historical printed/2D material images, but ordinary high-quality digital cameras, set on tripods, often downward-facing, and manual page-turning. There is various plans for DIY rigs for such on the internet, for instance here: https://www.diybookscanner.org/ . (although th…

There are a number of commercial substantially sub-$1k prosumer overhead book scanner options now that have nicer work-flows and more automated post processing than the DIY book scanners folks used to hack up (or hand feeding a flatbed) - I think they came out of and subsequently took took a lot of the air out of the DIY efforts. CZUR has been pretty generous with giving book scanning rigs ( https://www.czur.com/product/ETscanner ) to prominent hobbyists (I think CuriousMarc and Shelby from TechTangents and a couple other retrocomputing type youtube folks got them - apparently it was a good marketing move, that's why I'm aware of them).

The two downsides to those rigs here are that it looks like this effort is aiming for 600dpi capture and that would be a ...reach... for the reasonable cost overhead systems, and (Using it as an example because I've looked at theirs) CZUR's machines only go up to about an A3 scan area, while computer shopper was a ridiculous 13x10" format which would be a bit too big to do in the expected 2-up workflow with their units.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#130

Post by selimthegrim »

textfiles wrote: post #43
reaperman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any moderately large scale book scanning effort: https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...

That prototype "only" damages 70% of the pages.

It must be a Soviet machine for scanning 40% of the pages then.
Post reply on HN