Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

By the 80's, Service Merchandize had green screen "Silent Sam" terminals in all their stores you could walk up to, order what you wanted, pay right there, then walk to the back of the store and pick it up from a conveyer belt from the warehouse area, a bit like picking up your luggage.

Imagine if this kind of system went through a dial-up and the items were simply shipped to you. We would have had mass e-commerce in 1985. The French did actually have something like this via their minitel system, fwiw.

In the end, open-ish standards and SSL won the race, which is probably a good thing. I'd rather be stuck with a broken-ish web than locked into these various proprietary designs controlled by one corporation. Even if Sears/Prodigy would have delivered these services, they would have been crushed by the web.

View on HN

For some reason I really hate the name "Service Merchandise". I'm only familiar with it from Wheel of Fortune, I don't know where the stores were located. Something about the name, though, like "soft serve". Grammatically ambiguous is the best way I can describe it.

It was a regional company, so depending on where you're from, it's not surprising that you never saw any of their showrooms. In other areas you had places like BEST (not to be confused with Best Buy). In my region (Northwest), there was a similar company named Jafco, which was purchased by BEST, along with a number of other chains.

Yup, I am from the Northwest and remember Jafco and then BEST.

In the 1980s the number of people who had dial-up online services at home was tiny. It wasn't anything close to mainstream until the mid/late 1990s -- well after the start of Sears' financial difficulties.

Yes, in 1993, when Sears decided to close their catalog, much of the internet was still considered off-limits for commercial purposes [1]. We take today's use of the internet for shopping (and other commercial uses) for granted, but in 1993 it was not at all 100% clear that such a use would be allowed.

[1] Business Use of the World-Wide Web, 1995, http://www.informationr.net/ir/1-2/paper6.html ("Commercial activity on the Internet has only recently been possible.")

But home computer adoption was skyrocketing at the time. My argument here is that once people saw the utility of this then they'd buy modems, the same way they saw the utility of printing and bought printers for their computers.

At the time, a modem was the same price, if not cheaper, than a printer or a floppy disk drive. It wasn't exactly a luxury expense.

Ah, you're suggesting Sears could have run their own dial-up shopping service? Maybe, but I think it was too early. It would have been a text mode system (home computers, such as they were in the 1980s, were systems like Apple II or Comnmodore or TRS-80 or maybe CP/M or DOS if you had a "business" computer at home).

Macintosh computers were available, but expensive and not a typical home computer. And bandwidth on dial up at that time was maybe 2400 baud, way too slow to send any kind of detailed images of products that consumers would want in a catalog.

It might have gained some adoption, but in that era I think most consumers would have found filling out an order form and faxing or mailing it in easier.

Prodigy was not text-only; it was mixed text and graphics, and 9600 modems were cheap and 14.4 modems were widely available in 1993.

I was active in the BBS scene during that time. What could be done over 1200-2400 baud was fairly impressive considering the technical limits. Especially when ANSI and RIP graphics became the norm. Later 4800 and 9600 modems became cheap. By the late 80s these were the norm.

Ordering systems would have been trivial to implement if the political and commercial will was there. Not too long after this you had Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL offering these kinds of services. I remember they let you order flowers, buy software, etc from their online systems.

The web and tcp/ip internet replacing it all didn't come until much, much later. From 1983-1995 online services were ruled by non-TCP/IP dial-up BBS services and proprietary services like Prodigy. Home internet didn't take off until 1995-1996 and even then it was fairly limited.

>Apple II or Comnmodore

On top of all the PC clones running DOS and Windows (Windows 1.0 was 1985), Amigas, Macs (as you mention), Timex/Sinclair, etc.

Macs were home computers, there were just less of them. Back in those days people paid large prices for home machines, so the pricetags might seem high today but the utility/novelty factors made up for it.

RIP graphics was like magic in its day!

In the mid-eighties to mid-nineties home computers still cost several thousands of dollars. Installing a modem was no small feat either in computers from that time.

Some were cheap. The TI 99/4a was almost being given away in the mid-80s. But I don't ever remember it being popular for accessing dial-up. Its Terminal Emulator implemented a proprietary protocol and was actually more popular for its text-to-speech capability.

My high end 486 dx2/66 was 2000 usd, in 1993, plus monitor.

Everyone in this thread is forgetting 1 thing:

PHONE shopping.

Yes. Where you have a phone and call someone to place an order.

Digital switching and the 1800 (nationwide toll free) number developed in the early/mid 1980's I'm sure had an impact here...

Toll free numbers were developed in the 60s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Telephone_Service

Reply on news.ycombinator.com