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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Interesting juxtaposition to today, I bought Byte MOSTLY for the ads. The computer scene was changing so fast in the 80's that the ads were interesting and wanted.

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Hell, in its prime Computer Shopper was a GIANT magazine of just ads, that you paid for.

I remember ordering computer parts over the phone, delivered COD, because I was 12, and didn't have a credit card or a checking account.

Computer Shopper had LOTS of ads, but it was not just ads.

I loved it, but preferred Byte and PC Magazine.

I remember the Gateway 2000 ads. Crazy.

In the early days (80's) it was primarily just ads and some reviews. Later they moved to mixing in some non-advertising content.

I don't recall, i think I have started reading it in 88. So it could be then.

That surfaced a memory… Mom buying one of those from Sam's Club and me pouring over it at home.

If you're not familiar with Computer Shopper, imagine something the size of a 2 x 2 grid of phonebooks and just as thick. They were impressively sized.

I spent a good chunk of my money back then buying the monthly issues, drooling over them. Unfortunatelly, it seems not many archivists have kept the 1990s editions... or didn't care to share them to the public, at least. I would have liked to get a copy in some kind of digital format.

It's interesting to recognise that the ads in these magazines were something many of us positively appreciated. Yet today, we go out of our way to try and suppress ads all over the web.

I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.

That'd be a tough claim to support today.

Yeah. The ads had a different feel, because things were moving so fast. The ads (often) were telling you something new was available, or something improved was available, or something was less expensive. They (often) weren't just trying to manipulate you into buying the same old stuff that you didn't need.

I remember looking through the latest issue, and at least once or twice an issue thinking "Huh, I never even thought of trying to have a computer do that." Issue after issue, month after month, there was brand new stuff that exceeded what I thought computers could do. I read the ads to learn what was happening.

The ads are still fascinating. Makes you appreciate 32G of RAM when you see 16K on sale! for $150

Someone should compare the price drops in RAM.

Prices dropped quickly back then.

More recently, I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. 10 years later I would expect my next to be 64GB.

For a while we ran out of useful stuff to do with more RAM. We tried to fill the gap with micro-service development but the pain/ego ratio is not as good as having one big app chunking up the whole place. I assume the new AI stuff will pick up the slack and we'll soon have much more RAM hooked up to our NPUs than to our CPUs.

Except for the trade war when tariffs were slapped on DRAM imports from Japan because of dumping. The prices listed in the ads by Jameco and other companies in the back of Byte tell some interesting stories.

I read (IIRC in Andy Grove's autobiography, Only The Paranoid Survive), that this dumping was what made Intel switch from making memory to processors. The rest is history.

It would be interesting to see if the price drops followed Moore's Law.

16KB ? You were lucky! (channeling my best Monty Python impression)

My first computer was a NASCOM-1 with 1KB available to the user, and didn't even have an assembler. You programmed it by entering hex op codes directly into memory! And we liked it that way!

Still, at least the NASCOM-1 had a keyboard, not like MIT's Altair 8800 of a few years prior where you only had binary toggle switches to setup the address and data bus to program each byte!

In the mid 90s to early 00s, I loved looking at the ads in the Sunday newspaper from computer stores, and month by month you could see prices coming down for all components, if not week by week.

The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.

I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective?

[1]: https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377

Aside from the aesthetics, the content of the ads was different than today. There was lots of advertising aimed directly at hobbyists. Today, you mostly have to go to specific niche places like tindie.com to find something similar. Or basically, a significant portion of the market was people with engineering skills.

Reading the ads, it's remarkable how many computer manufacturers there were. Most of them look like pretty small companies too, effectively showing how low the barrier to entry was to start a computer company. Shouldn't it be possible today, too? Why do we have so few manufacturers?

There are still some Mom & Pop shops that will put together a custom machine for you, but if you are talking about completely new computer architectures that aren't compatible with anything else the barriers to entry are so much higher. The expectations are miles away from where they were in the 80s. Back when everybody sucked it didn't matter that your first product barely works and had few capabilities. Today your competition is Intel, AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc... Trying to stand out compared to the giants is much harder. Plus you have to deal with the software. Making a DOS clone is no problem. Making a Windows 11 clone is orders of magnitude more work.

That's a great observation. Back in the day, I'd buy many magazines for the ads almost as much as the content.

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