An Ode to Computer Shopper | Hacker News Reader

An Ode to Computer Shopper

theatlantic.com

34 pointshudibras22 comments

Computer Shopper was the multi-vendor catalog for computers back when a dial-up BBS was all the networking you could expect at home.

There were also articles, every now and then something interesting like reviews of early PC UNIXen, scattered in with hardware roundups that often took the form of "200 laser printers!" each with a 1 paragraph blurb.

If you were the sort of teenager who was saving up for a computer to take to college - as I was - it provided endless opportunity to re-enter prices on spreadsheets while sighing over the latest unaffordable super-PC sporting a brand-new 80486DX-33 and 2 full megabytes of RAM.

In terms of "hours of 'entertainment' per dollar", the pre-ecommerce Computer Shopper exceeded all other media, second only to going through the white pages and making prank calls.

(There, I think I made enough "old person" references.)

Let me fix this up a bit:

Making prank calls from your neighbor's phone line with a beige box, wishing you had the money for a laptop with a built-in modem so you can use their line to dial up to NetZero and telnet to some stuff.

You're not helping. We spelled it "Telenet" back then[1], and we used kermit to get to it, but we mainly used it for UUCP.

My school was on BITNET, which really...bit. Laptops still required mains power supply. They were just portable. :-)

I'm going to hang a bloody onion on my damned belt now.

[1] I'm joking. They're different things.

"Computer Shopper was like Vogue or Vanity Fair for nerds. You read it for the ads."

Someone clearly has never opened up a Vanity Fair in his entire life.

Agree. Actually hard to believe that's not just a quick mistake given that "Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic".

I looked up the author's bio to check which pronoun to use and also did a double take when I saw "senior editor at The Atlantic." I am hoping it is just a case of pandering to the nerd stereotype. The only other explanation is that Atlantic's online push has dramtically lowered the bar for quality.

I fondly remember going over each page of Computer Shopper before going to the Computer Fair to price out a new 486. But I also remember subscribing to VF so I could get my Christopher Hitchens fix.

I think, perhaps, you should read some of his other articles before making a judgement call on the Atlantic's quality or Alexis' qualifications.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...

A decrease in quality was one of the possible explanations. The other was that he is just pandering to the nerds. That is a great article, but it still does not change the fact that I expect people in the publishing business to have a more informed opinion than "people just read VF for the ads." However if you want to make it a debate about the quality of Alexis' writings all I can say is that he is no Christopher Hitchens or Michael Lewis.

I'm not sure Computer Shopper either. There was loads to read. I used to keep them all for reference because of all the multi-part articles, which were like courses. That was the good thing about it, tons of ads and lots to read.

Frankly, I owe a lot of my knowledge and interest to that mag.

I too liked Computer Shopper for both the ads and the articles. All of the BASIC Stamp articles were quite the thorough treatise on the capabilities of that small system.

But what I miss is the openness. I've got the databook from Western Digital that let me write a BIOS for CP/M for the Cromemco series machines, it told me everything I needed to know to exercise every feature of their chip. Today, due to a combination of licensing and just sheer complexity issues such data sheets have largely faded away. I've been playing around with some of the ST Micro ARM chips and to really "get" them you have to have the ST Micro Data sheet, the ARM Cortex-Mx TRM, and the ARM7-M TRM. That is a ton of information about a chip with millions of transistors. Its just hard to put all of that into an accessible space. Even the lowly Microchip PIC or ATmega parts have fairly large datasheets associated with them compared to say the Z80 data sheet.

The most annoying though are the interconnects. You could easily get all the bus specs for the original IBM PC, but getting all the USB specs for a modern one? Harder and harder.

I really dislike the pervasive sense that I, as a developer, need to pay some tribute to the manufacturer before they will "allow" me to develop things with their product. Its not a general case thing, Atmel is pretty good about telling you anything you want to know for example, but every time I run into it, it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

> Even the lowly Microchip PIC or ATmega parts have fairly large datasheets associated with them compared to say the Z80 data sheet.

And oh what you could do with a Z80 or a 6502, a few kilobytes of RAM and a couple support chips!

I miss the days of the 1" thick Computer Shopper. I remember lusting over ads featuring 3,000 Mb hard drives that cost something like $2-3K each and thinking "man...if I could only have one for my BBS". I remember the ZyXEL modem ads and how happy I was when I finally got the U-1496+ for Christmas and could start pulling my FidoNET mail down at 19,200 bps. Who could forget the Viewsonic ads with the "simulated" screen image of the Gouldian finches and thinking, "Damn...17" monitor...unreal!"

Computer Shopper is still somewhat nostalgic for me, but I quickly lost interest after discovering pricewatch.com: http://wayback.archive.org/web/19970209004411/http://www.pri... I was in my 20s, but pricing and building K6 or 300A machines with Voodoo2s or FireGL cards for Unreal and Lightwave takes me back.

Same experience for me -- I couldn't justify buying Computer Shopper when pricewatch.com was far more timely. I did enjoy the column with Alice and Bob and that kept me buying it for a little while longer.

PriceWatch was a late entry into the game. (1995)

Oh, important point. "Computer Shopper" in the US is not even the same type of thing as the same-named magazine in the UK. US: articles from Steven J Vaughan-Nichols. UK: articles from Charles Stross. SJVN now reports on open-source stuff for ZDnet, and Stross writes SF. Both are occasionally seen on HN.

I'd think of Byte, Creative Computing, or even early Wired as more of a Vanity Fair for nerds than Computer Shopper.

Byte is a good comparison. There were ads and then there were ads hidden as articles.

In the later years of Byte? In the early years ('70s, '80s) it wasn't really like that (the way I recall, anyway!).

The guy's talking absolute hogwash about reading it for the ads. Yes, some of them had nice stuff, but the there were a load of great columns and a young me read most of them, learning a whole load. I still probably have a bunch of paper clippings somewhere!

If only someone had saved these for future generations :) https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper

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