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.

1) I was in the Atari 8-bit camp

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...

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.