Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There's no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let's just start at the beginning.
Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as "this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the unofficial 'bible' of the state of hardware and software to the general public throughout the 1980s and 1990s." While it was just a pleasant little computer tabloid when it started in 1979, it quickly grew to a page count that most reasonable people would define as "intimidating".
[...] So, there I was whining online about how it was 2023 and nobody seemed to be scanning in Computer Shopper and we were going to be running into greater and greater difficulty to acquire and process them meaningfully, and I finally, stupidly said that if we happened on a somewhat-complete collection, I'd figure out how to do it.
And then an ebay auction came up that seemed to fit the bill.
Ed note: I well remember. Some editions stretched to 800 or more pages! It seemed that I could barely get through one edition when the next month's edition would come along. Who else remembers?
(Score: 1) by BlueCoffee on Thursday June 08, @07:48PM (7 children)
But I definitely remember buying Computer Shopper. It was a giant-sized magazine.
(Score: 4, Informative) by crb3 on Thursday June 08, @08:41PM (6 children)
And then it got Ziffed.
(Score: 2) by owl on Thursday June 08, @10:27PM (5 children)
Yeah, it did go downhill after the ZiffDavis takeover. It just was never the same after that.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 09, @02:25AM (4 children)
Ah, is that what happened to it. I remember when it changed and got thinned out and wasn't the same anymore, but didn't know why.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Friday June 09, @03:24AM (3 children)
Yes, the "thinout" of Computer Shopper started after it was sold off to ZiffDavis. Of course it was also sold off (if memory serves) around the same time as the beginnings of general "internet" access for the average joe. So while ZiffDavis probably had some hand in the 'thinning', the new up-and coming internet sales sites of the time also had a role (in that advertisers likely started pulling back from "print" to go "online").
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 09, @03:33AM (2 children)
And I think it was kinda all one thing.., the swap meets started thinning out then as well (definitely was a symbiosis, you'd see copies of CS everywhere) and by the time internet shopping arrived, those too had become a has-been.
Same thing happened with a more-local ad rag that I liked (can't remember the name).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Sunday June 11, @06:16AM (1 child)
In the Los Angeles area, computer swap meets never recovered after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday June 11, @06:32AM
One of the smaller swaps (Burbank area) went along pretty good up to about 2002, and I remember because that's when I bought a 21" monitor from my favorite dealer. But within a year after that all the component dealers disappeared and it was nothing but Chinese junk dealers, and shortly thereafter ended entirely.
I generally didn't do Ontario or Anaheim as that was a damn long haul from Lancaster, so I don't recall when they closed up.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday June 08, @07:57PM (12 children)
If the ad lists the price as CALL, don't waste your time. Find an ad that lists an actual price instead.
Uncle Samsung wants you!
Everything you need to build a kick ass PC is in there, but use bookmarks and write out tables on paper for the best deal.
I am not aware of any equivalent resource on the web today. The information is there but it's nowhere near as convenient and there's a lot more scams.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EvilSS on Thursday June 08, @08:53PM (9 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 08, @09:42PM (8 children)
There was a time when NewEgg was decent. Then you had to start searching Amazon for better deals than NewEgg would publish for the same parts, now it's just a mess but luckily most things are so damn cheap it just doesn't matter.
Late 1982 my new Atari 800 with 16K of RAM was $799 + $49 for a BASIC programming language cartridge, then the (horrible barely functional) cassette tape data storage and pray for retrieval device was $79, an 88K 5.25" floppy drive was $399, decent joystick was $30... For a decently functional system you were looking at $1300+, at a time when my earning ability was $3.35 an hour - taxes. 400+ hours of washing fast food dishes.
Today I grumble about a quad core 2GHz i5 NUC with 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM being almost $400 because of price collusion between Amazon, NewEgg, Intel et al, but I earn that money in less than a day's take home pay, so I don't grumble too loudly.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by owl on Thursday June 08, @10:01PM (1 child)
Scaling your numbers for inflation since 1982 (using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/): [usinflationcalculator.com]
Which rather puts into perspective just how much cheaper computer hardware has become. $4,086.76, or thereabouts, in today's dollars to buy an Atari 800 system in 1982 vs $400 to buy that i5 NUC that is some huge multiplier more performant than the old Atari 800 ever was.
Note, the Atari 800 was also my first real computer, mid 1982 as well. But my recollection was it was $699 (although maybe Dad found a sale) and I thought the Basic cart. was included (or at least I don't recall it being an extra purchase).
That cassette recorder was truly "pray for retrieval". Upgrading some months later to one of the 810 disks was a huge relief vs. worrying if the cassette was going to lose one's data every other day.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 09, @12:58PM
Just a couple of years later I picked up an Atari 400 for $25, brand new in box from a computer seller. Prices dropped amazingly quickly at the time, and I basically bought when I could afford to. Just a few months after I bought my 800 with 16K of RAM, the RAM prices dropped dramatically and I expanded it to 48K of RAM with two additional 16K boards for something less than $100. Those boards came in housings that made them run hot, so the housings got removed for stability - it would get hung after warming up with the housings on.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Thursday June 08, @11:47PM (2 children)
Several years ago I presented an Atari 800 display at VCF PNW. I had a full set of original release hardware which consisted of the following:
According to the June 1980 dealer price list, it all came to damn near $4000 in 1980 dollars! http://archives.smbfc.net/uploads/retrocomputing/atari800/AtariPriceList1980.pdf [smbfc.net]
If you're interested, here's a shot of my table: https://twitter.com/MechanicJay/status/1109501117426130944/photo/1 [twitter.com]. The top disk drive and stuff like the BASIC cart are my original ones from the 80's. The 410 drive was my Uncles. The rest of it I've been slowly collecting over the years.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 09, @12:23AM
I left the 800 and an upright piano with my mother sophomore year in college. I got the piano back about 10 years after graduation, but the 800 probably got thrown out at some point.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday June 09, @02:31AM
That table is so nicely organized it could be a museum exhibit. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by martyb on Friday June 09, @06:32AM
When I bought my Atari 800, the sales person mentioned how nearly every purchaser also bought the "Star Raider" video game.
When I saw it demoed at the store, I didn't hesitate and bought my own copy, too.
A few months later, I was at the student union doing some studying. A couple classmate and I had just finished setting up for a concert that evening. At one point I happened to look up and saw the union manager appear... rolling in a big, wheeled cart. (It was about 5'x4'x1.5') "What's that?" I asked. "It's a video projector", he replied. (The idea was that campus groups could use it to show movies. These was a screen that could be lowered and that could support a 15-foot (~5 meter) diagonal.) "Hmm. What kind of inputs does that have? Can it accept an NTSC signal?" "Sure!" he replied. "Are you going to be around for a while?" I asked. He indicated that he would. I then hurried back to my dorm room and got my Atari 800. As I had suspected, when he realized what I had in mind, he was totally onboard with the idea. Yup! You guessed it! I immediately hooked my Atari to the projector. I send the audio to the speakers set up for the concert. Did I mention out sound system had 2,000 watts of amplification?
That's right. I was playing "Missile Command" on a huge, 15-foot diagonal screen and with a deafeningly loud sound system. The first time I launched into hyperspace, the roar coming out of the speakers was awesome! Remember, this was about 1980! I had the greatest time for about 10 minutes until I had to stop because someone was complaining about the noise! Now THAT was *FUN*!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Friday June 09, @07:55AM (1 child)
Oh yes. I remember that on my 800XL. Waiting many minutes for a simple piece of software, usually a game, to load, with quite a bit less patience than I have these days, and then sometimes that long wait would be terminated with an abrupt "BOOT ERROR"! The frustration and disappointment could get quite intense.
My father also had an Atari 400. I was fascinated by the membrane keys and chunky styling. I remember one of the Ataris, probably my 800XL, would regularly go into the Self Test mode and at that age not really knowing what else to do I would run through all the tests (I particularly remember one playing a range of musical notes) and it would pass them all. I never solved that issue but looking back maybe it was some faulty RAM. Fun times.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 09, @01:04PM
I wrote a side scrolling periodic table program for the 800, adapting code from magazines for the interrupt service routines and GTIA manipulations to make the table larger than the screen then showing a window on that with a sprite overlay for a big cursor.
The display flickered when it moved... never could make that go away on my 800, but it turned out it was a GTIA silicon bug that was fixed in the 800XL - put my program on an 800XL with zero modifications and it ran perfectly stable, no flicker at all.
Back in the day, in my area, Atari computer users were a small minority under Commodore 64 and Apple II... I knew there was something I liked about this SN user base, and now it comes out! Atari desktop users!
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Friday June 09, @07:36AM
General rule of shopping:
If you can't see the price, you can't afford it.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday June 09, @11:33AM
That reminds me of those 1990s Microcenter advertisement where they would always list the price of Apple Macintosh computers as "$$$$". I'd love to see an archive of the Microcenter paper ads. They only stopped doing paper ads a few years back. Personally I found those paper ads much easier to read through than digging through the web site, especially when looking for sales. Besides, if you needed to buy a new computer because your current one was dead, then how else would you get the info?!
I'd also like to see an archive of JDR Microdevices catalogs. As I recall, many of those featured artwork of Robert Tinney, who did cover art for Byte.
Some of these magazines and such have a lot of history, showing when things were first available. I have a 1984 "PC Buyers Guide" that has a section for IBM PC clones, and lists just the few hand full that were out there at the time. Columbia Data Products, Eagle, Colby PC (Not really a clone, just a 5150 modded in to a luggable case), and a couple others. That was before all the Taiwanese crap flooded the market.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday June 08, @08:03PM (4 children)
At some point in the 90s, I decided that Computer Shopper was the right way to buy computers and peripherals. Whenever I needed a new box, I would go pick up a recent copy and study it carefully until I knew what was available in the market, and then study it carefully again until I found the vendor with the right offering. It continued to be my go to way of getting a new computer long after it had been obsoleted by online shopping.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 08, @09:35PM (2 children)
I think Computer Shopper was the right way to buy / build a PC for a couple of years in the 1990s, and I may have built a couple (486 / early Pentium era) out of print-ads 1-800 phone in and give your CC number deals.
All good things come to an end.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by StupendousMan on Thursday June 08, @10:05PM
Computer Shopper was my reference for finding a 486 on which I could play Doom. I remember calling some place like "Kay Bee Systems" on the phone (it was in California, and I was in New Jersey, so it was a _long distance_ call!) and confirming the specs with the owner. Those were the days ...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09, @01:11AM
Any couple of years in the 1990s. It still was pretty good when I was messing with it around 2000.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 09, @02:35AM
Yeah, I did a lot of that too. Then went well-armed to the "computer swap meets" (which used to be a huge deal in Los Angeles, at their peak even taking over the entire Ontario fairgrounds exhibit complex) and had my way with the dealers' offerings.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday June 08, @09:49PM
I bought that and PC Magazine every month. Those massive multi-pound editions must have took a whole tree to print they were that large. And washing the cheap ink off that got on your hands going through the pages, ahh the fun times....
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Thursday June 08, @11:27PM
I could spend hours pouring over the ads, reading the articles, and dreaming of having the money to buy all the stuff I really wanted in there. The early and mid 80s was a great time to be a computer hobbyist.
(Score: 1) by Snegbuff on Friday June 09, @07:30AM
I loved it! Laid the whole world of available goodies right before your eyes on those massive pages.
The reviews were great with some very funny comments in them:
"Threatened to fry and egg on the hard drive"
"The disk drive sounded like a jet taking off."
(Memory may not be exact, but you get the idea.)
It was also the one that tipped me off that most of the reviews you read in other magazines were written by the marketing departments of the companies that made the products, not the person whose name was attached to the article.
Those were the days...
(Score: 1) by UncleBen on Friday June 09, @05:01PM
I remember it well. It was required time-wasting at work. I don't think any of us ever finished a single copy, but we'd all toss the latest screaming deal or real oddity back and forth over lunch.
Like the WEC, everything was in there.