Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog | Hacker News Reader

Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog

wired.com

49 pointspepperpizza41 comments

The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day. Where else would we discover things like home computers, videodisc players, Walkmans, etc? There's nothing ridiculous about these items being shown here. They were state of the art in the early 1980s.

And the word "Ridiculous" in the headline is a kind of throwing stones in a glass house as far as Wired goes. I have a CueCat that proves it.

"The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day. Where else would we discover things like home computers, videodisc players, Walkmans, etc?"

Hmmm, in the '70s is was more like Popular Electronics, which famously launched Microsoft (I wish I'd saved that issue!). And I found the Heathkit catalog to be the most interesting in this direction; heck, they even had an LSI-11 (PDP-11 on a chipset) based computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11).

But it's telling the Sears catalog devoted real estate to a glossary of computer terms (last item in this article); there was a lot of educating to do to develop customers back then. I was also impressed that most of the terms were still in use, even if we aren't using floppies any more.

30 yrs ago, I was getting my information from Byte, Dr. Dobb's Journal, Creative Computing, and Antic[1]. I am still sad they all went away.

1) I was in the Atari 8-bit camp

Archive.org has some Byte Magazine back issues (eg: http://archive.org/stream/BYTE-1993-05#page/n11/mode/2up)

Awesome. The ads are the best part. I loved finding the very Gateway 2000 model I was lucky enough to get that year. With the "Windows Programmer Pack"!

Of course the more informed people were reading Popular Electronics, Byte (my personal favorite), Creative Computing, etc.

But while those magazines reached millions, Sears catalogs reached an order of magnitude more than that. Possibly two orders of magnitude.

Companies bent over backwards to get their products noticed by Sears. If your product made it to the catalog, that was the 1975 equivalent of being bought by Google. Atari fixed a last minute glitch that almost kept Pong from being carried by the company:

http://books.google.com/books?id=lKZriBxbcwQC&lpg=PA41&ots=D...

They are at least obviously too young to realize that a Betamax VCR would not be described as a "VHS - Beta".

Maybe they thought it was a beta test of a VHS vcr?

"Beta" quality products would never have shipped back then, at least successfully. Something happened in the 10 years that has allowed companies to ship unfinished products, and for consumers to feel lucky to participate.

As if companies never released beta products back then. The difference between now and then is that now we might actually get a patch.

Caught using interns to write articles?

They left out my window to the world - the shortwave radio. Way before the internet the notion that you find out what was going on all over the world, without the gatekeeping of the big three networks, was as mind-blowing to me as having my very own computer.

The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day.

True. I dropped Wired when the ratio of ads to content (not including content that was essentially ads) became ridiculous. They're a catalog.

At least Sears never refereed to their publication as a "magazine". Maybe if they included some advertorials they would have done better.

I know this may a bit off topic but the Sears catalog was also how some young kids got off the pictures of women in bras. As a Frenchman this was ridiculously funny to me.

"Sears should have morphed into Amazon."

They were so close. They started the Discover CC, the Prodigy computer network, and were the largest retailer nationwide. They shut down mail orders two years before Amazon launched.

http://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline...

I don't know about the US, but many small towns in Canada still have a Sears storefront where people can pick up their orders. My parents furnished their cottage that way.

The Sears "Catalogue" is also still alive and well. The 2013 Wish Book is 700 pages: https://secure.sears.ca/catalog-request

Can confirm. I live in Northern Canada, and often Sears has the cheapest shipping on larger items, appliances, etc. Our shipping options are extremely limited (mostly just Canada Post). I bought a 40" TV that cost me only $7 in shipping, delivered to my local gas station /Sears Pickup Depot. I'm about a ~30 hour drive north of Vancouver

What's equally amazing for me is the human mind after seeing this article. In 1983 I was heavily into cycling and probably went through all the bike pages over and over. When I hit the second last image just now and saw the faux "action" shot of the guy on the bike I remembered it vividly. Hard to believe my mind has been holding that image for 30 years just waiting for a match.

Great trip down memory lane for my generation. Thanks.

I loved reading the Sears catalog. That and the heathkit catalog (because I couldn't afford anything in it, just the catalog).

Before they stopped making it, I always though the solution to stopping many wars would be to airdrop them into the countries fighting and see how much better the world can be.

Today that is naive I guess.

Not so naive. Read enough Soviet history, and you see how desperate the Communist leadership was to provide their citizenry with household goods comparable to those available in the West. It's as if one of Ronald Reagan's major policy struggles was ensuring every house had a microwave oven.

The inability to simulanteously fund a superpower-level military establishment while enabling a rich "lifestyle" for the people led Gorbachev into the economic and governmental reforms that ultimately undermined the regime.

Indeed; a Refusenik friend of mine said the TV propaganda contrasting "the rich" and "the poor" in the US generally failed because the target audience could see the poor in the US in the '70s or so really weren't that bad off, something members of the nomenklatura making this stuff probably didn't really appreciate.

It's a difficult topic, but I can't help thinking that many 20th and current troubles have their roots in idealists wanting to westernize their societies after seeing the western (and/or soviet) prosperity. So far the attempts seem to have pretty poor success rate. Of course there are no easy answers here. But spreading the gospel of western lifestyle seems to be as likely to incite revolutions and bloodshed as it is likely to pacify.

Seriously, no one mentions the lingerie section?

http://my-retrospace.blogspot.com/2011/10/catalog-15-more-sl...

I still have my TI 99/4A - best christmas ever.

I still have my Timex/Sinclair 1000, Atari 800 and Canon AE1 Program. :)

And unlike the other pieces of tech, the Canon AE1 Program can take better pictures and has a better interface than most cameras today.

I loved mine as well, and not just for Tunnels of Doom. It did turn into quite the monstrosity by the time the expansion chassis (with the disk drives, assembler card, extra RAM cards, etc.) was hooked up -- it was almost like having a real computer, what with all of the cabinets and wires and whatnot. (Even line-number TI Extended Basic became really useful with the disks, since you could dynamically load subroutines.)

I finally sent mine, along with the expansion box, to the recycler a couple of years ago. Hadn't used it in over a decade.

I recently bought my third TI-85 on Craigslist, I also still have my Cannon A-1.

Ridiculous? Way to look down on old tech...

A Canon ae-1 or Pentax K1000 is still very popular with people that either shoot film, or are just starting to experiment with a 35mm camera.

The K1000... the workhorse entry level SLR. Popular in High School photojournalism classes everywhere at that time. Also my first "real" camera. Entirely manual but also brilliantly simple... to set the aperture you simply center the needle in the viewfinder, feedback on over/underexposure was instant and intuitive.

I also had a K1000 and it was a blast from the past to see it in the corner of the catalog.

They made them unchanged from the mid 70s to the turn of the century, a good quarter century run.

The prices in wikipedia are ridiculous. 40% off, yeah whatever. My K1000 body was barely over $100 new in the very early 90s. I bought lenses on sale and they generally set me back $50 or so each, roughly a high school kids weekly part time job paycheck.

The differences between my K1000 and my father's old spotmatic were the spotmatic used a threaded lens and the K1000 used a bayonet mount (like a BNC connector, kinda) Also the spotmatic required a now unobtainium mercury based battery. Not mercury added to lower internal resistance like modern alkalines, but mercury itself was an electrode.

I agree the UI on the K1000 kicked butt. Trivial to adjust while shooting, fast, simple. No modern camera app comes close because of hardware limitations. Also image quality was vastly superior especially with lower ASA films and even a cheap high school student lens.

Pentax also had the best lens coating of the time, so even the cheaper 50mm students could afford had great color transmission. It's still sought after for it's unique color rendering, and pristine lenses sell for a premium.

30 years from now, some future "Wired" will give the Sears Catalog treatment to today's Wired.

From age 14 to 31 I worked for my uncle who had a coin-op business from what I recall the Dragon's Lair arcade game used the CED but it may have been a Video Laser Disc player I can't remember but I do know the thing was huge and never worked.

It used a Laserdisc, the CED needle in a groove system would have probably worn out the media probably faster than the game's random access of scenes worse out the mechanics of the Pioneer players, which while industrial models didn't quite envision the extremes of games. E.g. probably more for teaching people how to repair stuff.

Wikipedia devotes quite a bit to the problems in keeping the games running: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair e.g.:

"The life of the original player's gas laser was about 650 hours; although later models had solid state lasers with an estimated life of 50,000 hours, the spindle motor typically failed long before that."

There was an NFL arcade game that used CED though http://www.cedmagic.com/featured/nfl.html

Cameras, phones, music players, computers, not much has changed really.

You know it's the 80's when everything is built out of right angles, from phones to cameras to bicycles.

oh man this is great, i remember all of this

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