Re-live buying a computer in 1995 [video]
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Me in 1995: I can't wait to see what fantastic technology we'll have 25 years from now!
Me in 2020: watching videos of people buying computers in 1995
Yes but can you sit there and wait for several hours before accessing a grainy 240p clip of a whale being blown up, and then thinking it was the best thing ever for three days? Kids these days....
1978: copied selected vinyl to cassettes for portability
1988: copied selected CDs to cassettes next
1998: designed RIAA circuit for digitizing vinyl collection
2008: never did digitize much
2018: people are listening to vinyl all over again
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
RFC1661 (PPP) was not formalized until July 1994.
PPP must have rolled out really fast or went through a few beta periods. I remember using it as early as ‘93. Our ISP gave you the option of SLIP or PPP when you dialed in.
What about the NeXT WWW browser?
Connecting a Windows computer to the Internet with Winsock didn't happen until the early 90s.
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282081
* Less buying options
* No online shopping so the FOMO of a better deal is not there
* The staff actually knew what they were talking about and less salesy than they are today
This is either very ironic or Simpsons-level future prediction.
I had a very similar job at a retail store called PC Club in Santa Ana, CA from 1995-1997. It was my first job, started when I was 14. I had a blue PC Club polo shirt and a pretty rad pony tail.
I was also a purely technical “sales” guy, just like the guy in the video. Could talk specs all day and repeat anecdotes about the differences between different vendors’ components. Had the worst sales numbers in the company because I only sold people the minimum of what they needed and did not understand the concept of revenue or profit margins. My adult colleagues were sometimes making 10X more than I was in commissions.
It was fun being in a small computer store during the era when the 486DX was hot stuff, SIMM RAM was transitioning to DIMM RAM. The Pentium was coming on the scene. Burning MP3s to CDs was popular. We played music at the store all day via a demo PC that was running WinAmp. Our tech support guys in the back were real techies. US Robotics 14.4 modems were cutting edge.
Luckily for me I found my way to a technical IT role when a PC Club customer hired me to help him with his local IT business. And then came full circle 14 years later to find out the hard way how important sales are when I started my first company.
Thanks for sharing this video.
The shelving layout looks like the components section, which was behind the checkout area of the store. This was where you could buy discrete computer parts like motherboards, CPUs, memory, HDDs, cases, PSUs, network switches and cabling, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing, and tiny parts like capacitors and voltage regulators. Components was adjacent to the telephone and Appliances departments.
Where else in Palo Alto was there ever so much variety of inventory for sale? The Radio Shack in Downtown was tiny, and I don't recall Egghead computers in Menlo Park ever having even near that much inventory, but I was quite young at the time.
By the way, where was The Wiz located? I remember the tagline "Nobody beats the Wiz!", but it was founded in New Jersey [1] and don't recall such a store ever existing near Palo Alto (or the Bay Area). A bit tough to search for today thanks to the thorough marketing campaigns by a cyber security company sharing the same name.
[0] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/12/27/the-era-of-fr...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz_(store)
I miss Fry's (¬_¬ ) - but not the shitty returns line, haha.
I wonder if there is any detail that would support the fact that this video was filmed in 95 and in not 94.
So uh, you guys _really_ like SMS, huh?
I don't care much for Whatsapp myself and prefer Signal, but I eventually gave up because life's too short for crusades.
Reading up on the iMessage adoption in the U.S.A. is like reading alternative-history fiction in Europe :P
Edit: more moderate phrasing
Caveat: I successfully did it with one group of friends. Have completely failed in all other attempts.
Second guy, hard-selling the PC....
It’s just because him or his family already had a PC. It was tribal. Remember it was a lot of money and people would natural want to justify that the decision they had made was the right one. It was not an straightforward choice at all.
There are people who you can educate to a certain extent who will convert to a sale given a patient conversation. Others were there to waste your time. This stuff was a lot of money and folks often didn’t have it, or didn’t understand what they were going to do with the computer. Other people would get a rise out of pretending to have money.
My normal technique was to hang out or approach people in a few specific areas and talk them through 2 computers. My goal was ~15m interaction if they weren’t moving down the funnel. No more.
That first guy is an ideal customer. He’s fishing for reasons to buy, as a sales dude, let him do the work, then drop the margin stuff (warranty, training, etc) at the end.