Comment by th0ma5
12 hours ago
I subscribe to Microcenter's emails and the one with the miscellaneous lesser priced accessories always completely loads in Gmail and it gives me a little bit of that feeling of flipping through an old computer shopper. I think those are all being scanned too and uploaded to the archive I think https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-may-1996-images...
For the young'uns among us, imaging that you didn't have access to the Internet, but you still needed to research and build a PC from parts. Now imagine someone mails you a 896 page (!!!) magazine describing basically every part you could ever actually need or want, along with a gazillion vendors for each.
And you got a new version every month.
It was pure magic, I tell you.
It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it.
The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.