"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.