Hacker News Reader

I've said it before, The IA is a crown jewel of the internet. But now I'll add "and God Bless Jason Scott".

This might be one of the most important historical pricing repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's tracking the emergence and transition between technologies, correlation against production yield information, corporate histories...this could be a backbone all other North American computer history could be hung off of.

It's a time long gone, but 2009 wasn't that long ago, and reaching from the beginning of personal computing to then is an amazing thing.

edit: wow, and I mean wow the results look great https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

edit2: WHAT, THEY'RE ALSO OCR'd???!?!?! Holy Fuck

edit3: if you don't, you should listen to Jason's podcast, it really helps get into the mind of an amazing human https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526

finger guns

I was skimming though the pages of this issue from 1986 and thought how those prices for hardware seem fairly reasonable. But looking it up, the inflation since 1986 was ~176%, so 1 USD back then equals about 2.76 today.

I work very long hours for the Internet Archive, and I am making a huge difference in the world working for them. It wouldn’t be right or useful for me to take on any other job. I also don’t want to be doing something like making “stuff” that I sell or otherwise speculate into some market. Leave aside I have these documentaries to finish, and time has to be short.

from http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251

In a world where people are rushing to pump out AI generated content, polluting the internet, all for a buck - people like Jason also exist. What a gem of a person!

Saint Jason Scott of the Internet is how the machines will remember him.

You can just smell the pages as you flip through.

This is a perfect example of how our technologies have let us down - Computer Shopper and the like (including newspapers) were useful precisely because they could be quickly browsed and flipped through.

That's not really possible with the wretched things we call "browsers" today - Heck, even with a high-bandwidth connection and a nice 4K screen to display it, I still can't nearly as readily flip through pages of the IA Computer Shopper scans as I could through the actual physical media. Browsing, along with its attendant and deliberate page-turning to move on to something new, have been replaced by endless scrolling of sameness. The Ads are all dynamic, so even though they're the things that catch your eye the most, they're not usable as navigation context markers anymore - note how different all the ads were, and how the uniqueness page layout became something a litlte bit memorable, so you could more easily flip back to re-find something you'd read a few dozen pages back.

Browsing is an excellent quick, easy way to MAKE CONNECTIONS between lots of different data coming from lots of different sources. That sort of thing created much more well-rounded, smarter people, and society is poorer for having moved to overly structured media. (And ads are media, too (heck they're nearly all of Computer Shopper) - just try going back to find an ad you saw on a site last week!) Static location context matters - humans are wired to think in terms of physical relativity, and our UIs give that up only at great cost...

I've been fully spoiled by PCPartPicker [0], which just invisibly filters out parts that aren't compatible with the components already selected for a build. The idea of having to manually keep track of every compatibility check at every component interface sounds like a path to debugging hell. On the other hand, that makes success a far stronger nerdcred signal.

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/

The sheer variety of weird and wonderful ways things could be incompatible is really tamed by modern standards. I remember spending days as a kid working out obscure IRQ conflicts blindly flipping plastic jumpers, or editing config files.

I don't miss it!

My first use of spreadsheets was to track IRQ, IO Port and memory address conflicts :p

I remember when this was just something the creator was messing with. Its come a long way.

Parts compatability isn't really too hard. Pull up the mobo specs and make sure your ram timings, CPU socket, PCI, and power demand all line up.

I think what a lot of younger people also don’t realize is how gigantic a single issue of computer shopper was. They were as thick as phone books with thin weight pages. I remember multiple issues being well into the thousands of pages.

I don’t think younger people understand your description of how thick Computer Shopper was. Because most likely they don’t know how thick is a phone book ;D

For those that don't know, a phone book was often about twice as thick as a Thomas Guide.

That should help.

And a Thomas Guide was about as thick as 8 or 9 J.C. Whitney catalogs.

That couldn't even fit on a floppy disk. You know, that icon thing kids click on to save things.

Another set of imperial units unknown to us Europeans? :-) How tick was that, a couple of inches / 5 cm?

1/2000 of a football field, give or take

American Football, or soccer?

It would be about 6 American Football compact disk jewel cases.

American of course, the other sort isn't a unit of measurement!

15-20 Farmer’s Almanacs.

So around 6 iphones?

Once Computer Shopper became huge phone-book-sized things I quit buying them because I just didn't have the room or the time - fortunately our college library subscribed and I could peruse it there, but generally I'd read Byte, Creative Computing or Dr. Dobb's Journal instead. I recall when CS was kind of a newspaper prior to being a bound magazine format.

Computer Shopper, Dr. Dobb's, and Byte were all incredible and indispensable. I miss them all sorely and often wish that there was anything comparable in existence (online or not).

I used to use old ones as rifle target backstops. .22LR would not penetrate a single issue.

It's very brave to mention such heinous crimes in this discussion.

I should brag on my 1988 - 1996 complete run of "PC Magazine" too

I imagine that at the time they were just as ubiquitous as the phone books.

Fair. I guess historians would also object against destroying phone books, if not right now, in a hundred years.

We recently told our daughter what a phone book was. She was flabbergasted.

Whenever asked what period I (a proverbial young person, SWE) would go back to if I had a time machine, I always answer with roughly this period. To be alive during those days to see the development of the shoulders I now stand on would be such a treat, as I’m sure anecdotes like these only scratch the surface of all the stories to be told.

That said, if any of you oldheads have links to such things, do share - always curious to learn more about the beige age. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and I’m here for that secondhand.

I think this book captures a good bit of the spirit

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984598.Masters_of_Decept...

Eh, while the media seemed to be into "hackers" in the sense of people breaking into systems (and either messing them up or just to do it for bragging rights), that wasn't what most of us were into -- instead we were interested in writing software to get the most of the hardware we had (and used "hacker" in the old-school sense of expert coders).

Steven levy, “hackers: heroes of the computer revolution” probably a bit more your tune, maybe.

Yes, I've read that.

Back in the 90s, my brother actually had a subscription to Computer Shopper (he had a side hustle building PCs for entertainment industry folks). I only ever bought it if I was planning on building something which was rare because computers were expensive back then. The last PC I built literally did not have two components from the same vendor. To be honest, I don’t miss those days. Say what you like about the “Apple tax,” it’s very nice to have one company who will take responsibility for things not working and my experience, at least, has been that they stand behind their products (at least as long as they’re under AppleCare).

> Say what you like about the “Apple tax,” it’s very nice to have one company who will take responsibility for things not working

Where's the fun in that? Building your own PC is a thrill - budgeting, chosing components, excitedly waiting for each to arrive or picking them from shelf, assembling everything and then pressing the power button to power everything up for the first time. Followed by your heart sinking when nothing happens "ohfuckohfuckohfuck, did I I just burn something out - there isn't any smoke, but I hope it's not the processor". Reseat everything, reconnect cables, get an some sign of life, but it's an error code - progress. Multiple attempts at fixing the error and finally get a POST screen. Apple can't sell that emotional experience or sense of ownership - self-built machines have a personality.

The extra RAM and/or cores I get from a self-build vs. equally priced Apple computer is just a bonus. Modern standards make surprise incompatibilities less likely than in the past, looking at the specs works 99.9% of the times

The excitement of those old days is still very much alive in the Raspberry Pi community. I just configured a new PiBox server to do some fairly serious work, including serving as the archive NAS for two ne startups. (It's more than capable of doing that work - it has more CPU power, more RAM, and more storage than Chevron's Crays had when I worked there in the '90s!)

Motherboard headers -> Cases have somehow not evolved what feels like at all. Myself and my brother just built from scratch within the past month and both fumbled the Power switch/Reset switch connections.

I honestly had to laugh at the lack of progress in the area.

The ads were much more than just "new version of the old thing" (motherboards, RAM, sound cards, video cards). About every issue, there would be something (or more than one) that I never even imagined you could do with a computer (or, usually, make into a computer peripheral). It was mind blowing to see, over and over, here was something completely new (or at least new to me). And there was something I'd seen before for less money, and something I'd seen before with better performance. Over and over, month after month. It was like watching the future on fast-forward.

>>” Of course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they existed in the 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience store in the middle of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and "beige box" off a COCOT (customer owned coin operated telephone) to make those calls. I might have been guilty of doing something like that...”

Ohhh man! I was just a few years too late for that but I remember reading and hearing about it. It was a dream of mine! Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.

>Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.

I'd be very surprised if this wasn't accidental given the character of this site, but holy moly is the pun fitting. Congrats.

...and "beige box" off a COCOT...

I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to call)

A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the one end. You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

I definitely mean "beige box." Red boxes were (mainly?) for telephone company phones that would recognize the coin tones. Those phones had a different line "class of service" at the switch end and the critical point is that red-boxing was the only way (post blue-box era anyway) to get free calls off of them. Well, at least that I knew of. But a COCOT had all the "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the line was a normal line, so if you clipped in at the demarc box, "upstream" of the actual phone, you were on a plain old phone line (with long-distance service) that you could use to your heart's content. And by the time frame I'm talking about, there weren't a lot of the red-box'able telephone company payphones around in our area.

If some COCOT's were also susceptible to red-boxing, that's something we never discovered. To be fair though, it never even occurred to me to check. I just had it burned into my brain at some point that red-boxing was for telco phones and not COCOT's.[1] In hindsight, that was quite possibly folklore that was wrong.

You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

Yep. It just worked out that a convenience store in the middle of nowhere with a COCOT out in the parking lot was a good scenario for doing this kind of thing without getting caught. Or so I'm told... :-)

[1]: https://www.tech-faq.com/red-box.html

> But a COCOT had all the "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the line was a normal line

There is one still operating in the parking lot of a general store in a tiny, tiny town near me. I keep wanting to put an old-school modem on my laptop, paying it a visit, and dial up a BBS (a few of those still exist, too), just for old time's sake and maybe a nostalgia overdose.

by the time I learned about them, red boxes didnt work on telco payphones. we had one customer owned one in a pizza shop, it looked like an old fashioned beige desk phone, but had equipment tacked on to take money. That was the only one we could get it to work with.

It’s kind of amazing to think of how profoundly boring my life might have been if there was no such thing as long distance charges.

It was the one thing I carried everywhere as a teenager.

Yep, been there, done that.