Online Shopping in the 1950s | Hacker News Reader

Online Shopping in the 1950s

messynessychic.com

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The projection system, you can see in a photo, was made by Vitarama. Vitarama developed a number of interesting projection systems, but their best known was Cinerama, the three-camera widescreen format that was briefly popular in the '50s but had long-lasting influence by popularizing widescreen films. One wonders if Fred Waller, Cinerama's inventor, worked on this project. He was sort of an inventor of the classic type.

In another photo we see what I think is a Teletype Model 15, behind the clerk handling an impressive rolodex. It even appears to have a Bell Canada Trans-Canada Telephone System badge on it. Transmitting orders was a very popular application of teletype service, and a lot of Bell advertising in both the US and Canada focused on customers like Hudson's Bay and Montgomery Ward.

I’m impressed you have such knowledge. HN is an amazing place.

Check out OP's https://computer.rip

I am a complete shameless fanboy.

> The personal desktop computer won’t be invented for another 12 years.

I'd believe that personal desk-sized computers were 12 years later, but personal desktop computers were much later.

But a 1950s desk has as much surface area as four(!) of today's desks. Don't forget about desk shrinkflation.

Similar to what a dollar could buy in the 1950s, a single year would also last for many more days back then.

we need more of this brand of silly in the world, thank you

> Today, shopping while sitting in a comfy chair instead of aimlessly wandering around a store is becoming second nature to a lot of us

This system however was a store that you had to go to in order to look at pictures of products (that you couldn't actually touch, try on or take with you like in a real store) - so it's actually the worst of both worlds. Of course it was a solution for shopping in remote places (hence Canada), but so was the (by that time already "good old") mail order catalog, which you could use in the comfort of your own home. Those were later updated with color pictures and telephone ordering, so they were as good as this system and in some ways better.

This doesn't help with the feeling that our era ~innovations are overrated.

Also interesting, the old version of this page is archived here https://archive.is/B7Wnb

Well they invented the steam engine and the computer in Rome and Ancient Greece respectively, but they used the former for children's toys and the latter only to predict the timing of the olympic games (as far as we know). In Ancient South Asia they created an abstract and fully systematized language (Sanskrit), in Ancient Egypt they managed to stack massive blocks of sandstone into monuments with interiors that remained some of the highest buildings in the world for millennia...I'm sure there are equally impressive examples in Ancient China and Mesoamerica, but I don't know of them.

Its like that old debate in Marxist political economy, between forces and relations of production: is it technology itself that produces wealth, or is it the social arrangement (including the non-human natural and technical elements) that does? Clearly, if you look at history, all the wealth of today's world only came when all the great developments of the human world were synthesized into vast industrial convolutes--so perhaps in some sense its both.

Before (and during) this we had catalogs you browsed at home, and after choosing your purchases you called a number and made your order by wiring money or paying at reception.

And even before (and during) that you did the same thing via postal service.

Incremental "improvements" at best.

See also: online dating (and the pitfalls thereof) as showcased in a 1967 episode of Green Acres

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0592766/

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