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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoFor those that don't know, a phone book was often about twice as thick as a Thomas Guide. That should help.
- mindcrime 3y agoAnd a Thomas Guide was about as thick as 8 or 9 J.C. Whitney catalogs.
- pmontra 3y agoAnother set of imperial units unknown to us Europeans? :-) How tick was that, a couple of inches / 5 cm?
- keithalewis 3y agoThat couldn't even fit on a floppy disk. You know, that icon thing kids click on to save things.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoOnce 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.
- JohnFen 3y agoComputer Shopper, Dr. Dobb's, and Byte were all incredible and indispensable. I miss them all sorely and often wish that there was anything comparable in existence (online or not).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 3y agoI used to use old ones as rifle target backstops. .22LR would not penetrate a single issue.
- rbanffy 3y agoIt's very brave to mention such heinous crimes in this discussion.
- h2odragon 3y agoI should brag on my 1988 - 1996 complete run of "PC Magazine" too
- Aeolun 3y agoI imagine that at the time they were just as ubiquitous as the phone books.
- rbanffy 3y agoFair. I guess historians would also object against destroying phone books, if not right now, in a hundred years. We recently told our daughter what a phone book was. She was flabbergasted.
- soupfordummies 3y ago>>” 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...” Ohhh man! I was just a few years too late for that but I remember reading and hearing about it. It was a dream of mine! Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.
- lightspot21 3y ago>Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't accidental given the character of this site, but holy moly is the pun fitting. Congrats.
- dec0dedab0de 3y ago...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.
- mindcrime 3y agoI 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 https://www.tech-faq.com/red-box.html
- JohnFen 3y ago> But a COCOT had all the "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the line was a normal line There is one still operating in the parking lot of a general store in a tiny, tiny town near me. I keep wanting to put an old-school modem on my laptop, paying it a visit, and dial up a BBS (a few of those still exist, too), just for old time's sake and maybe a nostalgia overdose.
- bane 3y agoI'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/Computer%20Shopper_February_1986_Aesthetic/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526
- textfiles 3y agofinger guns
- elaus 3y agoI was skimming though the pages of this issue from 1986 and thought how those prices for hardware seem fairly reasonable. But looking it up, the inflation since 1986 was ~176%, so 1 USD back then equals about 2.76 today.
- akudha 3y agoI work very long hours for the Internet Archive, and I am making a huge difference in the world working for them. It wouldn’t be right or useful for me to take on any other job. I also don’t want to be doing something like making “stuff” that I sell or otherwise speculate into some market. Leave aside I have these documentaries to finish, and time has to be short. from http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251 In a world where people are rushing to pump out AI generated content, polluting the internet, all for a buck - people like Jason also exist. What a gem of a person!
- dhosek 3y agoBack 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).
- sangnoir 3y ago> 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 when nothing happens "ohfuckohfuckohfuck, did I I just burn something out - there isn't any smoke, but I hope it's not the processor". Reseat everything, reconnect cables, get an some sign of life, but it's an error code - progress. Multiple attempts at fixing the error and finally get a POST screen. Apple can't sell that emotional experience or sense of ownership - self-built machines have a personality. The extra RAM and/or cores I get from a self-build vs. equally priced Apple computer is just a bonus. Modern standards make surprise incompatibilities less likely than in the past, looking at the specs works 99.9% of the times
- dublin 3y agoThe 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!)
- stewarts 3y agoMotherboard headers -> Cases have somehow not evolved what feels like at all. Myself and my brother just built from scratch within the past month and both fumbled the Power switch/Reset switch connections. I honestly had to laugh at the lack of progress in the area.
- modriano 3y agoI've been fully spoiled by PCPartPicker [0], which just invisibly filters out parts that aren't compatible with the components already selected for a build. The idea of having to manually keep track of every compatibility check at every component interface sounds like a path to debugging hell. On the other hand, that makes success a far stronger nerdcred signal. [0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ https://pcpartpicker.com/list/
- showerst 3y agoThe sheer variety of weird and wonderful ways things could be incompatible is really tamed by modern standards. I remember spending days as a kid working out obscure IRQ conflicts blindly flipping plastic jumpers, or editing config files. I don't miss it!
- EricE 3y agoMy first use of spreadsheets was to track IRQ, IO Port and memory address conflicts :p
- red-iron-pine 3y agoI remember when this was just something the creator was messing with. Its come a long way. Parts compatability isn't really too hard. Pull up the mobo specs and make sure your ram timings, CPU socket, PCI, and power demand all line up.
- glotchimo 3y agoWhenever asked what period I (a proverbial young person, SWE) would go back to if I had a time machine, I always answer with roughly this period. To be alive during those days to see the development of the shoulders I now stand on would be such a treat, as I’m sure anecdotes like these only scratch the surface of all the stories to be told. That said, if any of you oldheads have links to such things, do share - always curious to learn more about the beige age. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and I’m here for that secondhand.
- ChoHag 3y ago[dead]
- CuriousSkeptic 3y agoI think this book captures a good bit of the spirit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984598.Masters_of_Deception https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984598.Masters_of_Decept...
- jhbadger 3y agoEh, while the media seemed to be into "hackers" in the sense of people breaking into systems (and either messing them up or just to do it for bragging rights), that wasn't what most of us were into -- instead we were interested in writing software to get the most of the hardware we had (and used "hacker" in the old-school sense of expert coders).
- singleshot_ 3y agoSteven levy, “hackers: heroes of the computer revolution” probably a bit more your tune, maybe.
- jhbadger 3y agoYes, I've read that.
- miroljub 3y ago[flagged]
- pkphilip 3y agoYep, been there, done that.
- datavirtue 3y agoIt was the one thing I carried everywhere as a teenager.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoThe ads were much more than just "new version of the old thing" (motherboards, RAM, sound cards, video cards). About every issue, there would be something (or more than one) that I never even imagined you could do with a computer (or, usually, make into a computer peripheral). It was mind blowing to see, over and over, here was something completely new (or at least new to me). And there was something I'd seen before for less money, and something I'd seen before with better performance. Over and over, month after month. It was like watching the future on fast-forward.
- singleshot_ 3y agoIt’s kind of amazing to think of how profoundly boring my life might have been if there was no such thing as long distance charges.