Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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I've said it before, The IA is a crown jewel of the internet. But now I'll add "and God Bless Jason Scott".

This might be one of the most important historical pricing repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's tracking the emergence and transition between technologies, correlation against production yield information, corporate histories...this could be a backbone all other North American computer history could be hung off of.

It's a time long gone, but 2009 wasn't that long ago, and reaching from the beginning of personal computing to then is an amazing thing.

edit: wow, and I mean wow the results look great https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

edit2: WHAT, THEY'RE ALSO OCR'd???!?!?! Holy Fuck

edit3: if you don't, you should listen to Jason's podcast, it really helps get into the mind of an amazing human https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526

I work very long hours for the Internet Archive, and I am making a huge difference in the world working for them. It wouldn’t be right or useful for me to take on any other job. I also don’t want to be doing something like making “stuff” that I sell or otherwise speculate into some market. Leave aside I have these documentaries to finish, and time has to be short.

from http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251

In a world where people are rushing to pump out AI generated content, polluting the internet, all for a buck - people like Jason also exist. What a gem of a person!

Saint Jason Scott of the Internet is how the machines will remember him.

I was skimming though the pages of this issue from 1986 and thought how those prices for hardware seem fairly reasonable. But looking it up, the inflation since 1986 was ~176%, so 1 USD back then equals about 2.76 today.

finger guns

You can just smell the pages as you flip through.

This is a perfect example of how our technologies have let us down - Computer Shopper and the like (including newspapers) were useful precisely because they could be quickly browsed and flipped through.

That's not really possible with the wretched things we call "browsers" today - Heck, even with a high-bandwidth connection and a nice 4K screen to display it, I still can't nearly as readily flip through pages of the IA Computer Shopper scans as I could through the actual physical media. Browsing, along with its attendant and deliberate page-turning to move on to something new, have been replaced by endless scrolling of sameness. The Ads are all dynamic, so even though they're the things that catch your eye the most, they're not usable as navigation context markers anymore - note how different all the ads were, and how the uniqueness page layout became something a litlte bit memorable, so you could more easily flip back to re-find something you'd read a few dozen pages back.

Browsing is an excellent quick, easy way to MAKE CONNECTIONS between lots of different data coming from lots of different sources. That sort of thing created much more well-rounded, smarter people, and society is poorer for having moved to overly structured media. (And ads are media, too (heck they're nearly all of Computer Shopper) - just try going back to find an ad you saw on a site last week!) Static location context matters - humans are wired to think in terms of physical relativity, and our UIs give that up only at great cost...

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