5 ms·

I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort comma

I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort command for just $135! A PC card with a 68000 coprocessor for heaven knows why! The good old days were fun for their sense of everything-is-new adventure, but there's an awful lot I don't miss.

myth_drannon 1y ago
"Borland introduces Turbo Prolog, the natural language of Artificial Intelligence" just $99.95!
th0ma5 1y ago
I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images.zip_202406 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...
- kstrauser 1y ago
  For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each. And you got a new version every month. It was pure magic, I tell you.
  - glimshe 1y ago
    It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it. The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
    - mrandish 1y ago
      Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
    - musicale 1y ago
      > I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads. How else are they going to force you to view advertisements for things that you are completely uninterested in and which are completely unrelated to the page you are viewing?
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it. If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop. Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious. So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.
senderista 1y ago
You don't miss being able to make a living from writing your own software?
- kstrauser 1y ago
  That part sounds pretty wonderful, but it also means you were paying through the teeth for everyone else’s software, too. There are still plenty of small shops making a nice software living today. I don’t have the nerve to do it myself, though.
- khazhoux 1y ago
  No one ever talks about how OSS literally devalued software, which resulted in the best hackers being forced to take corporate jobs.
  - PaulRobinson 1y ago
    If you listen to RMS’ talks, arguably this is a feature, not a bug. Most people pick up on the idea of freedom as in liberty with OSS: that you should be able to amend software at will. Strangely there are limits in his mind (at one talk I attended he insisted he didn’t care about being able to amend the software in his microwave, so didn’t care if it was Free or not). However when asked about how programmers should make a living, his economic argument is that we should be paid for our hours, not for our software. In his telling, the right economic model is not the author who writes something once and is paid forever by everyone who wants to consume that “art”, but more like the trading crafter who makes and sells things on an on-going basis. In support of that model, the “devaluation” of software, has meant we have a planet running on it that would not have been possible if every library and application on ever machine had cost $100-$500 each. The advances in scientific and medical research powered by that software driven World would not have been achieved yet, but neither would the damage caused by social media and adtech. I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on. I’ve had a good career being paid to write software because of its growing influence in the World, which likely would have stalled if OSS didn’t exist. But sure, I like the idea of spending a year writing something and living the rest of my life off the proceeds, like most people would.
glimshe 1y ago
Remember that these are 1986s dollars, worth nearly $3 today.
musicale 1y ago
> A C compiler for just $495! Turbo Pascal was $49.99 though...

myth_drannon 1y ago

"Borland introduces Turbo Prolog, the natural language of Artificial Intelligence" just $99.95!

th0ma5 1y ago

I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images.zip_202406 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...

kstrauser 1y ago
For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each. And you got a new version every month. It was pure magic, I tell you.
- glimshe 1y ago
  It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it. The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
  - musicale 1y ago
    > I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads. How else are they going to force you to view advertisements for things that you are completely uninterested in and which are completely unrelated to the page you are viewing?
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it. If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop. Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious. So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.

senderista 1y ago

You don't miss being able to make a living from writing your own software?

kstrauser 1y ago
That part sounds pretty wonderful, but it also means you were paying through the teeth for everyone else’s software, too. There are still plenty of small shops making a nice software living today. I don’t have the nerve to do it myself, though.
khazhoux 1y ago
No one ever talks about how OSS literally devalued software, which resulted in the best hackers being forced to take corporate jobs.
- PaulRobinson 1y ago
  If you listen to RMS’ talks, arguably this is a feature, not a bug. Most people pick up on the idea of freedom as in liberty with OSS: that you should be able to amend software at will. Strangely there are limits in his mind (at one talk I attended he insisted he didn’t care about being able to amend the software in his microwave, so didn’t care if it was Free or not). However when asked about how programmers should make a living, his economic argument is that we should be paid for our hours, not for our software. In his telling, the right economic model is not the author who writes something once and is paid forever by everyone who wants to consume that “art”, but more like the trading crafter who makes and sells things on an on-going basis. In support of that model, the “devaluation” of software, has meant we have a planet running on it that would not have been possible if every library and application on ever machine had cost $100-$500 each. The advances in scientific and medical research powered by that software driven World would not have been achieved yet, but neither would the damage caused by social media and adtech. I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on. I’ve had a good career being paid to write software because of its growing influence in the World, which likely would have stalled if OSS didn’t exist. But sure, I like the idea of spending a year writing something and living the rest of my life off the proceeds, like most people would.

glimshe 1y ago

Remember that these are 1986s dollars, worth nearly $3 today.

musicale 1y ago

> A C compiler for just $495! Turbo Pascal was $49.99 though...