Re:Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog
by imaginator on Sunday September 01, 2013 @01:18PM
(#6311176)
Archive.org has some Byte Magazine back issues (eg: http://archive.org/stream/BYTE-1993-05#page/n11/mode/2up)
Re:Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog
by twoodfin on Sunday September 01, 2013 @02:53PM
(#6311566)
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"!
Re:Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog
by protomyth on Sunday September 01, 2013 @01:07PM
(#6311137)
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
Re:Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog
by joezydeco on Monday September 02, 2013 @11:49AM
(#6315672)
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...
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.