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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

575 points by kencausey 3y ago

dmbaggett 3y ago
I distinctly remember buying a 1GB hard drive in 1992 for $1300 via an ad in Computer Shopper. And that was a really good price!
starbird3000 3y ago
This is something I know a little about. Back in 2005/06 I asked Google who was doing non-destructive scanning of their books as I needed to scan our back issues to 1948 and no one would let me cut up bound volumes. They put me in touch with Kirtas Technologies that did the job for something like $20K and took two weeks (about 70 volumes). It's a lot cheaper now and the scanning quality is significantly better but the big headache is indexing. Since then I've been collecting spare issues of the magazine and last year sent a decade's worth off to be destructively scanned for about $6K. The quality is significantly better than the originals (and they have to do clean up as part of the process). I point this out to show what a challenging job is being attempted here and how really there is value and hard work in digitizing archives so there really shouldn't be an expectation of old stuff being 'free'.
EscapeFromNY 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004015/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004015/http://ascii.text...
sprior 3y ago
I buy Computer Shopper for the articles - said no one ever.
- berbec 3y ago
  Since it's been so long, I can't remember, but were there even articles - or was it just 999 pages of classified ads sold to the highest bidder?
  - stonogo 3y ago
    Most of the articles were product reviews, but I bought it for the BBS listings.
  - whartung 3y ago
    I have vague memories of counting the number of content pages against the advertising pages once, and it was at least 80% advertising.
  - wmf 3y ago
    They had to have articles to qualify as a real magazine, probably for reduced mailing rates.
- bluedino 3y ago
  Bob and Alice was a great column. There were some programming articles too, I learned my first compression algorithm from one!
- deleted 3y ago
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- dcminter 3y ago
  I used to buy the British edition at least partially for the articles, but it could be a damned hard slog finding them. In fact a lot of the computer magazines tended in this direction - presumably the consolidation around the PC and the commoditization of it ate into margins as they all focused on the one (albeit growing) narrower topic. By the by, I often joke that I buy The Economist for the pictures (not true, but the captions are often very sly jokes).
  - funnybeam 3y ago
    Including a regular Linux column by Charlie Stross before he started writing novels
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  That must be the Holy Grail of publishing. You're buying it for the ads. So nobody complains that it's packed absolutely full of ads. And they're selling it to you. That's amazing. (And it was true! We did want to see the ads!)
JellyBeanThief 3y ago
Here's the collection so far: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computer+Shopper%22 https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computer+Shopp...
analog31 3y ago
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.
- intrasight 3y ago
  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.
lr4444lr 3y ago
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!
- _yb2s 3y ago
  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.
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    I saw that, too. They are missing a decimal point. 11.95 and 29.95.
  - lucas_membrane 3y ago
    IIRC $300 each was 1 GB zip disks in the middle 1990's.
  - henrikschroder 3y ago
    I got an Atari STE in 1988, it used double-sided regular density 3.5" disks, with a capability of 720kB each, and back then it was a bargain to find no-name ones for ~$1, while the quality name-brand ones (Verbatim! Maxell!) cost about the double.
- BooneJS 3y ago
  I think I’ve been paying close to the same price for computers for 25 years. Moose’s Law and relentless miniaturization and cost optimization are the only reason why.
bglazer 3y ago
I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in standards for components, performance specs of components over time. All at the time of the Cambrian explosion of computing Also wow this is a gargantuan effort. I scanned thee equivalent of like one issue of Computer Shopper one time and it was painful. Kudos to the author.
- reaperman 3y ago
  For any moderately large scale book scanning effort: https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/ https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...
  - textfiles 3y ago
    That prototype "only" damages 70% of the pages.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Really? A comment on the page I linked said: > The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems. Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical artifacts you can only accept a lower % of damaged pages than human-powered scanning would cause.
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - textfiles 3y ago
        I assure you, I hate that thing. It has dogged me and the Internet Archive for over a decade. It is not just vaporware, but dangerous.
mindcrime 3y ago
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 Blaster card, etc. for that sweet new PC you were planning to build. And the BBS listings... A new BBS appearing in there, IN YOUR LOCAL CALLING AREA was a huge deal. I know the younger folks probably don't get the idea of "long distance" or probably even the idea of phone usage being metered and billed per unit, but back in the day calling a BBS that was long-distance was a good way to rack up a huge phone bill, and righteously piss off your parents (if you lived at home). Of course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they existed in the 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience store in the middle of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and "beige box" off a COCOT (customer owned coin operated telephone) to make those calls. I might have been guilty of doing something like that... Anyway, Computer Shopper was a big deal to a lot of people for a long time, and I'm personally thrilled to see these issues being preserved so some of that legacy can live on. Browsing the old issues online will never give one quite the same experience, but it's good that they'll be around.
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  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.
  - zakki 3y ago
    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
    - function_seven 3y ago
      For those that don't know, a phone book was often about twice as thick as a Thomas Guide. That should help.
noisy_boy 3y ago
> 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 did its job. One of the favorite things for us to do was to bring an old book to the shop and ask then to shave off few millimeters on each side (except the spine of course) - the frayed/yellow bits were gone and your book was new and born again :) This also was a great strategy if you wanted to reduce the dimensions of your book. Obviously only works with paperbacks and can't be repeated more than 3-4 times. I loved it then. > In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the glued issues of Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue starts to become slightly liquid and then carefully pulling the pages apart from each other, placing them on a large table I’m working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It’s a huge mess, and with hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work. I wonder if instead of using heat-gun to de-glue (?), it would be easier to just shave off an ever thin slice of that spine? (sorry if that was too gruesome for you).
- CSSer 3y ago
  Something like this? https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e
  - noisy_boy 3y ago
    Similar but 4-5 times as bigger - it could have chopped my 12 year old body in half. A beast of a machine. (I don't know what has come over me - my mind is only producing grisly descriptions)
  - bane 3y ago
    Probably more like one of these, a hydraulic guillotine cutter. https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4 https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4 https://youtu.be/BvLk6-OugIc 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.
russellbeattie 3y ago
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.
- dcminter 3y ago
  I find myself doing this with modern configurators from e.g. System76 even though I have no earthly use for such an over-powered system. The Maplin Catalogue back in the day was my choice for idle window-shopping; one could page through it for the components of some very castles in the sky imagined diy computer or gadget - none of which I could have successfully built even if I'd had the budget. Top nerd nostalgia.
- dublin 3y ago
  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...
kookamamie 3y ago
The site wasn't prepared for the incoming visitor tsunami, though.
UberFly 3y ago
There needs to be a nerdy online official saint or knighthood title for people like this.
- dcminter 3y ago
  Sounds like a job for... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calculus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calcul... (Also: completely agree - this stuff is going to be a fabulous resource for future researchers and meanwhile the rest of us reap the benefit by indulging our nostalgia - I'm full of admiration)
smilbandit 3y ago
ah the hours spent building the perfect computer on paper using arbitrarily decided limit of money I was never going to have.
snthd 3y ago
I thought the point in debinding was to use an autofeeder - to make the actual scanning less labor intensive. Wouldn't a camera based scanner be better? It still requires manual page turning, but will save on the prep work and destroying the magazines, even if just to sell on. The paper and ink quality will present they're own issues, but maybe those will be quicker to solve than the debinding and page feeding process. https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1358090982189719552?s=20 https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/13580909821897195... https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-scanner-and-viral-video-star/ https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sc... https://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/ The effort here to preserve history though is incredible.
- schlauerfox 3y ago
  In magazines there's a thing called full bleed, where the image goes to the edge of the paper, and the gutter between pages is glued together so cutting, shaving or flattening will still lose some image as the binding process isn't consistent, so to save as much image as possible, they're going to the trouble to be the archival standard, after all, he decided the deglue is best. Great article.
- toyg 3y ago
  With very thick books like those, debinding is necessary even just to get a good straight scan.
- textfiles 3y ago
  Well, there is no situation where this isn't in some way labor-intensive. But one of the reasons that I chose to use the feed scanner that I do is that I get 600 dots per inch on these scans of these massive tabloids.
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cout 3y ago
I wonder how feasible it would be to train an ai model to correct scanned pages, to avoid having to debind the magazines.
- jimjimjim 3y ago
  Uhh, to get the training set you would need a large collection of debound pages
firstSpeaker 3y ago
Sometime I feel sad that younger generations won’t have the excitements of early days of PC and sometimes I feel they might be better off spending their time on something that is more productive. One thing for sure, that era is gone and all The most of the enablers of that era are also history now. Amount of time I spend reading and researching which motherboard and RAM would best fit together makes me smile from time to time. Or the amount of time I spend searching for extra memory chips for my trident card…
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  1983: you can use it as a word processor 2023: give it a prompt and it will write it on demand 2063: welp there goes the Solar System
daneel_w 3y ago
Admirable effort. Thanks for preserving history.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Glad someone is doing it. Passion projects drive tech.
DoubleGlazing 3y ago
I loved Computer Shopper. I regularly bought the UK version in the 90s just to gawps at all those adverts and dream about buying my ultimate PC.
LeonM 3y ago
The Feb 1986 issue linked in the article caught my attention, since it is the month I was born. Page 10 starts with a story of someone planning to build a case for the Apple I, to take it to a computer show. The guy called Steve Jobs, and Jobs offered him to send the new tape interface, which Wozniak just finished. It is an utterly amazing read! https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/Computer_Shopper_February_1986_Readable/page/10 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...
Gordonjcp 3y ago
UK Computer Shopper was awesome in the early 90s. Fat wodge of newsprint covering everything from ZX Spectrums to NeXT stations. I think I still have my copy of the issue where they reviewed the Sun IPX, ghods I wanted one of those...
VincentEvans 3y ago
What is the value of digitizing computer shopper?
- textfiles 3y ago
  Read the room, and by the room, I mean this thread.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  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 manufacturers, when vendors stopped bothering to advertise 486 hardware, etc..
  - VincentEvans 3y ago
    Thanks for the genuine answer.
Rediscover 3y ago
The regulars, including Don Lancaster, were great. I would drool over so many articles that I barely understood, and one of my goals for the next month were to get caught-up on some part of this tech that had escaped me. Computer Shopper was fantastic for guiding me to complement my more formal studies. OT: Does anyone else still use 6502/65c816's and TMS32C32's?
kloch 3y ago
In the late 1990's I was curating a project to scan in every LEGO instruction and catalog booklet. One big problem was Moiré patterns. 300dpi seemed to maximize the artifacts and higher dpi resulted in images that were too large to use on typical displays of the time (not to mention most users were on 28-56kbps modems!) I settled on recommending 100-150dpi which eliminated most of the artifacts but still gave usable image size/detail. Then there were concerns about what LEGO (lawyers) would think about it. Because of this it originally didn't have thumbnails or any html on that part of the site. Just images in a directory structure exposed by mod_autoindex which give it a very utilitarian, non-commercial feel. Those fears were soon put to rest when I learned that LEGO customer service was referring people to the site when customers called in to request replacements for lost instructions. That archive lives on today at http://www.peeron.com/ http://www.peeron.com/ (not my site)
rtkwe 3y ago
Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a library is archived by essentially shredding the books and blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together in software. It's a very fun book that cranks up to a surprisingly exciting ending.
- ibiza 3y ago
  That's essentially how DNA sequencing works. The longest human chromosome (chr1) has about 250M bases. The DNA samples are sonicated to split them into small sequences, and then sequenced en mass 100-300bps at a time. The results are then reassembled into contigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput...
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    True, but you wouldn't do that to the very last one chromosome in existence. Some of these tomes might well be the last copy out there.
  - tetris11 3y ago
    The variability from one contig build to another is surprisingly big sometimes, lending some credit to the idea that Vernon's shotgun transcriptome approach probably has multiple "optimal" solutions.
  - m463 3y ago
    I thought craig ventner had a boat that did something similar to the ocean. It would scoop up genetic material on its travels, sequence what it found and store the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Ocean_Sampling_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Ocean_Sampling_Expediti... (the page doesn't seem to explain it)
  - rtkwe 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Someone's gone and done it. My god. You crazy bastard. I love you.
rbanffy 3y ago
> The cheap, cheap paper is a nightmare to run through a scanner Not to mention having a faint mirror image of the other side. You need a dark background and a lot of light on the front to catch as little of it as possible. And, then, one could add some smarts to try to align and subtract the image of the other side of the page to get an even cleaner image. Now, just imagine if they kept an archive of their photo plates (or, better for later issues, PDF copies). By 2009 that's the very least one should have.
jrochkind1 3y ago
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/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/. (although that site seems to be unmaintained with many broken links, it has enough working links you should be able to get the idea. This was a much more popular hobbyist DIY thing a decade+ ago, in the era of dawn of google books etc). I wonder if there were particular reasons OP went with a "scanner". it seems a lot of the challenge was finding an affordable scanner that could handle the material. Perhaps it ends up being much (much) faster per-page, especially if you are willing to destroy the original, and is so justified? (Even though they ended up having to do manual page feed, possibly still much faster?) Or if they just didn't think of camera-tripod-manually-turned-pages and know it was a (common) option? If it hasn't been considered, it might be worth considering, although the process they have seems to be working well -- the sample output is stunning!
- PAPPPmAc 3y ago
  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 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.
  - 3y ago
gumby 3y ago
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 have been the ur-vertical site. This shows how pernicious path dependence is.
- dublin 3y ago
  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...
  - gumby 3y ago
    eBay pulled it off. Just a search engine that pulled up a bunch of ads would have been great.
doctor_radium 3y ago
I was a Commodore guy in the 80's and 90's so didn't go for Computer Shopper as often as the rest of you, but did buy the occasional copy. Having said that, today when I encounter the phrase "high capacity magazines" in the news, I chuckle because firearms isn't what first comes to mind.
pcdoodle 3y ago
I think I got my 1st custom PC from a vendor in CS. It was a Pentium 1 166Mhz MMX / 8MB RAM and 1.2GB HDD. This is the box that I wrote a lot of VB6 code on for AOL, pirated my 1st MP3 (Deftones My Own Summer), and found my favorite SNES game (FF4). I didn't even know emulators were a thing! With windows 98 and with 8MB of ram, i really learned about startup items. There was a GE capital nearby that had a dumpster full of computer parts. I ended up finding some 8MB EDO sticks in the dumpster and it was the 1st time my computer would idle without trashing the HDD. 32MB was epic.
EricE 3y ago
I seriously thought about bidding on that ebay auction when it came up - I'm glad it went to a far better place! Good luck to him indeed - growing up in that time Computer Shopper was the logical progression from the Sears Wishbook.
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575 points by kencausey 3y ago

I distinctly remember buying a 1GB hard drive in 1992 for $1300 via an ad in Computer Shopper. And that was a really good price!

starbird3000 3y ago

This is something I know a little about. Back in 2005/06 I asked Google who was doing non-destructive scanning of their books as I needed to scan our back issues to 1948 and no one would let me cut up bound volumes. They put me in touch with Kirtas Technologies that did the job for something like $20K and took two weeks (about 70 volumes). It's a lot cheaper now and the scanning quality is significantly better but the big headache is indexing. Since then I've been collecting spare issues of the magazine and last year sent a decade's worth off to be destructively scanned for about $6K. The quality is significantly better than the originals (and they have to do clean up as part of the process). I point this out to show what a challenging job is being attempted here and how really there is value and hard work in digitizing archives so there really shouldn't be an expectation of old stuff being 'free'.

EscapeFromNY 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004015/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004015/http://ascii.text...

sprior 3y ago

I buy Computer Shopper for the articles - said no one ever.

berbec 3y ago
Since it's been so long, I can't remember, but were there even articles - or was it just 999 pages of classified ads sold to the highest bidder?
- stonogo 3y ago
  Most of the articles were product reviews, but I bought it for the BBS listings.
- whartung 3y ago
  I have vague memories of counting the number of content pages against the advertising pages once, and it was at least 80% advertising.
- wmf 3y ago
  They had to have articles to qualify as a real magazine, probably for reduced mailing rates.
bluedino 3y ago
Bob and Alice was a great column. There were some programming articles too, I learned my first compression algorithm from one!
deleted 3y ago
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dcminter 3y ago
I used to buy the British edition at least partially for the articles, but it could be a damned hard slog finding them. In fact a lot of the computer magazines tended in this direction - presumably the consolidation around the PC and the commoditization of it ate into margins as they all focused on the one (albeit growing) narrower topic. By the by, I often joke that I buy The Economist for the pictures (not true, but the captions are often very sly jokes).
- funnybeam 3y ago
  Including a regular Linux column by Charlie Stross before he started writing novels
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
That must be the Holy Grail of publishing. You're buying it for the ads. So nobody complains that it's packed absolutely full of ads. And they're selling it to you. That's amazing. (And it was true! We did want to see the ads!)

JellyBeanThief 3y ago

Here's the collection so far: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computer+Shopper%22 https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computer+Shopp...

analog31 3y ago

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.

intrasight 3y ago
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.

lr4444lr 3y ago

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!

_yb2s 3y ago
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.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  I saw that, too. They are missing a decimal point. 11.95 and 29.95.
- lucas_membrane 3y ago
  IIRC $300 each was 1 GB zip disks in the middle 1990's.
- henrikschroder 3y ago
  I got an Atari STE in 1988, it used double-sided regular density 3.5" disks, with a capability of 720kB each, and back then it was a bargain to find no-name ones for ~$1, while the quality name-brand ones (Verbatim! Maxell!) cost about the double.
BooneJS 3y ago
I think I’ve been paying close to the same price for computers for 25 years. Moose’s Law and relentless miniaturization and cost optimization are the only reason why.

bglazer 3y ago

I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in standards for components, performance specs of components over time. All at the time of the Cambrian explosion of computing Also wow this is a gargantuan effort. I scanned thee equivalent of like one issue of Computer Shopper one time and it was painful. Kudos to the author.

reaperman 3y ago
For any moderately large scale book scanning effort: https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/ https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...
- textfiles 3y ago
  That prototype "only" damages 70% of the pages.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Really? A comment on the page I linked said: > The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems. Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical artifacts you can only accept a lower % of damaged pages than human-powered scanning would cause.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - textfiles 3y ago
      I assure you, I hate that thing. It has dogged me and the Internet Archive for over a decade. It is not just vaporware, but dangerous.

mindcrime 3y ago

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 Blaster card, etc. for that sweet new PC you were planning to build. And the BBS listings... A new BBS appearing in there, IN YOUR LOCAL CALLING AREA was a huge deal. I know the younger folks probably don't get the idea of "long distance" or probably even the idea of phone usage being metered and billed per unit, but back in the day calling a BBS that was long-distance was a good way to rack up a huge phone bill, and righteously piss off your parents (if you lived at home). Of course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they existed in the 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience store in the middle of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and "beige box" off a COCOT (customer owned coin operated telephone) to make those calls. I might have been guilty of doing something like that... Anyway, Computer Shopper was a big deal to a lot of people for a long time, and I'm personally thrilled to see these issues being preserved so some of that legacy can live on. Browsing the old issues online will never give one quite the same experience, but it's good that they'll be around.

shiftpgdn 3y ago
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.
- zakki 3y ago
  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
  - function_seven 3y ago
    For those that don't know, a phone book was often about twice as thick as a Thomas Guide. That should help.

noisy_boy 3y ago

> 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 did its job. One of the favorite things for us to do was to bring an old book to the shop and ask then to shave off few millimeters on each side (except the spine of course) - the frayed/yellow bits were gone and your book was new and born again :) This also was a great strategy if you wanted to reduce the dimensions of your book. Obviously only works with paperbacks and can't be repeated more than 3-4 times. I loved it then. > In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the glued issues of Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue starts to become slightly liquid and then carefully pulling the pages apart from each other, placing them on a large table I’m working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It’s a huge mess, and with hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work. I wonder if instead of using heat-gun to de-glue (?), it would be easier to just shave off an ever thin slice of that spine? (sorry if that was too gruesome for you).

CSSer 3y ago
Something like this? https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  Similar but 4-5 times as bigger - it could have chopped my 12 year old body in half. A beast of a machine. (I don't know what has come over me - my mind is only producing grisly descriptions)
- bane 3y ago
  Probably more like one of these, a hydraulic guillotine cutter. https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4 https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4 https://youtu.be/BvLk6-OugIc 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.

russellbeattie 3y ago

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.

dcminter 3y ago
I find myself doing this with modern configurators from e.g. System76 even though I have no earthly use for such an over-powered system. The Maplin Catalogue back in the day was my choice for idle window-shopping; one could page through it for the components of some very castles in the sky imagined diy computer or gadget - none of which I could have successfully built even if I'd had the budget. Top nerd nostalgia.
dublin 3y ago
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...

kookamamie 3y ago

The site wasn't prepared for the incoming visitor tsunami, though.

UberFly 3y ago

There needs to be a nerdy online official saint or knighthood title for people like this.

dcminter 3y ago
Sounds like a job for... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calculus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calcul... (Also: completely agree - this stuff is going to be a fabulous resource for future researchers and meanwhile the rest of us reap the benefit by indulging our nostalgia - I'm full of admiration)

smilbandit 3y ago

ah the hours spent building the perfect computer on paper using arbitrarily decided limit of money I was never going to have.

snthd 3y ago

I thought the point in debinding was to use an autofeeder - to make the actual scanning less labor intensive. Wouldn't a camera based scanner be better? It still requires manual page turning, but will save on the prep work and destroying the magazines, even if just to sell on. The paper and ink quality will present they're own issues, but maybe those will be quicker to solve than the debinding and page feeding process. https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1358090982189719552?s=20 https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/13580909821897195... https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-scanner-and-viral-video-star/ https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sc... https://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/ The effort here to preserve history though is incredible.

schlauerfox 3y ago
In magazines there's a thing called full bleed, where the image goes to the edge of the paper, and the gutter between pages is glued together so cutting, shaving or flattening will still lose some image as the binding process isn't consistent, so to save as much image as possible, they're going to the trouble to be the archival standard, after all, he decided the deglue is best. Great article.
toyg 3y ago
With very thick books like those, debinding is necessary even just to get a good straight scan.
textfiles 3y ago
Well, there is no situation where this isn't in some way labor-intensive. But one of the reasons that I chose to use the feed scanner that I do is that I get 600 dots per inch on these scans of these massive tabloids.

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cout 3y ago

I wonder how feasible it would be to train an ai model to correct scanned pages, to avoid having to debind the magazines.

jimjimjim 3y ago
Uhh, to get the training set you would need a large collection of debound pages

firstSpeaker 3y ago

Sometime I feel sad that younger generations won’t have the excitements of early days of PC and sometimes I feel they might be better off spending their time on something that is more productive. One thing for sure, that era is gone and all The most of the enablers of that era are also history now. Amount of time I spend reading and researching which motherboard and RAM would best fit together makes me smile from time to time. Or the amount of time I spend searching for extra memory chips for my trident card…

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
1983: you can use it as a word processor 2023: give it a prompt and it will write it on demand 2063: welp there goes the Solar System

daneel_w 3y ago

Admirable effort. Thanks for preserving history.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Glad someone is doing it. Passion projects drive tech.

DoubleGlazing 3y ago

I loved Computer Shopper. I regularly bought the UK version in the 90s just to gawps at all those adverts and dream about buying my ultimate PC.

LeonM 3y ago

The Feb 1986 issue linked in the article caught my attention, since it is the month I was born. Page 10 starts with a story of someone planning to build a case for the Apple I, to take it to a computer show. The guy called Steve Jobs, and Jobs offered him to send the new tape interface, which Wozniak just finished. It is an utterly amazing read! https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/Computer_Shopper_February_1986_Readable/page/10 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

Gordonjcp 3y ago

UK Computer Shopper was awesome in the early 90s. Fat wodge of newsprint covering everything from ZX Spectrums to NeXT stations. I think I still have my copy of the issue where they reviewed the Sun IPX, ghods I wanted one of those...

VincentEvans 3y ago

What is the value of digitizing computer shopper?

textfiles 3y ago
Read the room, and by the room, I mean this thread.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
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 manufacturers, when vendors stopped bothering to advertise 486 hardware, etc..
- VincentEvans 3y ago
  Thanks for the genuine answer.

Rediscover 3y ago

The regulars, including Don Lancaster, were great. I would drool over so many articles that I barely understood, and one of my goals for the next month were to get caught-up on some part of this tech that had escaped me. Computer Shopper was fantastic for guiding me to complement my more formal studies. OT: Does anyone else still use 6502/65c816's and TMS32C32's?

kloch 3y ago

In the late 1990's I was curating a project to scan in every LEGO instruction and catalog booklet. One big problem was Moiré patterns. 300dpi seemed to maximize the artifacts and higher dpi resulted in images that were too large to use on typical displays of the time (not to mention most users were on 28-56kbps modems!) I settled on recommending 100-150dpi which eliminated most of the artifacts but still gave usable image size/detail. Then there were concerns about what LEGO (lawyers) would think about it. Because of this it originally didn't have thumbnails or any html on that part of the site. Just images in a directory structure exposed by mod_autoindex which give it a very utilitarian, non-commercial feel. Those fears were soon put to rest when I learned that LEGO customer service was referring people to the site when customers called in to request replacements for lost instructions. That archive lives on today at http://www.peeron.com/ http://www.peeron.com/ (not my site)

rtkwe 3y ago

Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a library is archived by essentially shredding the books and blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together in software. It's a very fun book that cranks up to a surprisingly exciting ending.

ibiza 3y ago
That's essentially how DNA sequencing works. The longest human chromosome (chr1) has about 250M bases. The DNA samples are sonicated to split them into small sequences, and then sequenced en mass 100-300bps at a time. The results are then reassembled into contigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput...
- rbanffy 3y ago
  True, but you wouldn't do that to the very last one chromosome in existence. Some of these tomes might well be the last copy out there.
- tetris11 3y ago
  The variability from one contig build to another is surprisingly big sometimes, lending some credit to the idea that Vernon's shotgun transcriptome approach probably has multiple "optimal" solutions.
- m463 3y ago
  I thought craig ventner had a boat that did something similar to the ocean. It would scoop up genetic material on its travels, sequence what it found and store the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Ocean_Sampling_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Ocean_Sampling_Expediti... (the page doesn't seem to explain it)
- rtkwe 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

Someone's gone and done it. My god. You crazy bastard. I love you.

rbanffy 3y ago

> The cheap, cheap paper is a nightmare to run through a scanner Not to mention having a faint mirror image of the other side. You need a dark background and a lot of light on the front to catch as little of it as possible. And, then, one could add some smarts to try to align and subtract the image of the other side of the page to get an even cleaner image. Now, just imagine if they kept an archive of their photo plates (or, better for later issues, PDF copies). By 2009 that's the very least one should have.

jrochkind1 3y ago

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/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/. (although that site seems to be unmaintained with many broken links, it has enough working links you should be able to get the idea. This was a much more popular hobbyist DIY thing a decade+ ago, in the era of dawn of google books etc). I wonder if there were particular reasons OP went with a "scanner". it seems a lot of the challenge was finding an affordable scanner that could handle the material. Perhaps it ends up being much (much) faster per-page, especially if you are willing to destroy the original, and is so justified? (Even though they ended up having to do manual page feed, possibly still much faster?) Or if they just didn't think of camera-tripod-manually-turned-pages and know it was a (common) option? If it hasn't been considered, it might be worth considering, although the process they have seems to be working well -- the sample output is stunning!

PAPPPmAc 3y ago
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 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.
- 3y ago

gumby 3y ago

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 have been the ur-vertical site. This shows how pernicious path dependence is.

dublin 3y ago
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...
- gumby 3y ago
  eBay pulled it off. Just a search engine that pulled up a bunch of ads would have been great.

doctor_radium 3y ago

I was a Commodore guy in the 80's and 90's so didn't go for Computer Shopper as often as the rest of you, but did buy the occasional copy. Having said that, today when I encounter the phrase "high capacity magazines" in the news, I chuckle because firearms isn't what first comes to mind.

pcdoodle 3y ago

I think I got my 1st custom PC from a vendor in CS. It was a Pentium 1 166Mhz MMX / 8MB RAM and 1.2GB HDD. This is the box that I wrote a lot of VB6 code on for AOL, pirated my 1st MP3 (Deftones My Own Summer), and found my favorite SNES game (FF4). I didn't even know emulators were a thing! With windows 98 and with 8MB of ram, i really learned about startup items. There was a GE capital nearby that had a dumpster full of computer parts. I ended up finding some 8MB EDO sticks in the dumpster and it was the 1st time my computer would idle without trashing the HDD. 32MB was epic.

EricE 3y ago

I seriously thought about bidding on that ebay auction when it came up - I'm glad it went to a far better place! Good luck to him indeed - growing up in that time Computer Shopper was the logical progression from the Sears Wishbook.

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