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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day. Where else would we discover things like home computers, videodisc players, Walkmans, etc? There's nothing ridiculous about these items being shown here. They were state of the art in the early 1980s.

And the word "Ridiculous" in the headline is a kind of throwing stones in a glass house as far as Wired goes. I have a CueCat that proves it.

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"The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day. Where else would we discover things like home computers, videodisc players, Walkmans, etc?"

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.

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

Archive.org has some Byte Magazine back issues (eg: http://archive.org/stream/BYTE-1993-05#page/n11/mode/2up)

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"!

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...

They left out my window to the world - the shortwave radio. Way before the internet the notion that you find out what was going on all over the world, without the gatekeeping of the big three networks, was as mind-blowing to me as having my very own computer.

They are at least obviously too young to realize that a Betamax VCR would not be described as a "VHS - Beta".

Maybe they thought it was a beta test of a VHS vcr?

"Beta" quality products would never have shipped back then, at least successfully. Something happened in the 10 years that has allowed companies to ship unfinished products, and for consumers to feel lucky to participate.

As if companies never released beta products back then. The difference between now and then is that now we might actually get a patch.

Caught using interns to write articles?

The writers at Wired are probably too young to remember that Sears catalogs were the equivalent of Wired magazine back in the day.

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.

I know this may a bit off topic but the Sears catalog was also how some young kids got off the pictures of women in bras. As a Frenchman this was ridiculously funny to me.

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