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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, a
by 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 agoThere 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 agoeBay pulled it off. Just a search engine that pulled up a bunch of ads would have been great.