I cannot believe no one has mentioned "Computer Shopper" yet! It was a large-format magazine (glue-binding) with hundreds of pages, mostly ads in the front, an

I cannot believe no one has mentioned "Computer Shopper" yet! It was a large-format magazine (glue-binding) with hundreds of pages, mostly ads in the front, and international BBS's in the back. The back was basically a paper version of WHOIS. Not every BBS listed what it did, and some were lame, but others had up to 16 (gasp) modems. Most you just got busy signals. And porn, lots of CGA 4-bit porn (this was before 320x200x8 VGA). But sometimes there were multiplayer games where you got one turn per day. The ads were for Chinese/HongKong companies that made clone parts. "Clone" was the big word back then, as in PC Clone. It was DIY without a helmet! I bought my first 32MB MFM HDD (back when you had to manually enter cylinders, heads, and sectors into the BIOS) and a 286 mobo out of Computer Shopper (with 512KB of DRAM in DIP format that cost like $500). And then started calling random BBSes all over Europe. Learned real quick to read the costs on my phone bill. There were also simple services for businesses. For example, my first job in the 80's used Novell token-ring netware in the office computers, but a few lucky people had modems. I remember using a service called EaasySabre [sic] to buy a plane ticket for business travel. It connected you to a TTY terminal that looked just like the screens the airline counter agents used. I felt supremely cool booking a ticket at 2400 baud from my first office, despite it taking FOREVER.