7 Nov
2008
7 Nov
'08
6:25 p.m.
From: "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at
gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Computer Shopper scans?
No, not that newsprint crap. It will start
disintegrating within 50
years, and the costs associated with acid paper stabilization are very
high. I see how the hobby publications of the 1940s are falling apart
now, and Computer Shopper is in the same danger.
And thus all my friends' paperback collections literally turning to dust.
Like it, or (mostly) not, Computer Shopper
is a very important slice of computing history.
I'm not so sure of that.
It's not a scholarly journal such as the Journal of the ACM,
but it shows the state of the art for hobbyist & business machines,
such as price & capacity of hard drives, CPU, RAM,
when certain peripherals were ubiquitious, etc.
Some of the ads were memorable,
particularly for things that didn't happen as anticipated.
It also listed BBSs, which was the only way for
online/virtual communities before the Internet
and well-connected services such as GEnie, Prodigy, Delphi, BIX, ...