In 1993, it was scary business buying a home PC.
A new system typically ran around two grand. And a typical first-time buyer had no clue what RAM was, how big a hard drive should be, and what dot pitch was.
And even though I'm a professional geek nowadays, in 1993 I was an electrician who was fascinated by computers, and who saw lots of benefits in obtaining his own system.
He just didn't have a clue as to how to go about buying one without getting ripped off.
Enter Computer Shopper.
I went down to Phillip's Food Center in my home town (it's not there anymore either) and purchased a two-pound volume of Computer Shopper. I took it home and studied its vast contents for a week. By the end of that time, I knew that I was seeking a 486 DX-33 with four megs of RAM, a 250 MB hard drive, and a monitor with .28 dot pitch. I needed a SVGA card with a meg of RAM to get good resolution and performance. I also wanted a 24-pin printer (affordable inkjets were still a year or two away). If I could locate a package with all of that for around 1700 bucks, it would be a bargain.
I ended up getting a local to custom-build me that package with a 486-SLC2 66 IBM board for 1500 dollars.
Thanks to my CS education, I knew that I had scored a seriously great deal, indeed.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has his own fond remembrance of CS over at Computerworld. SJVN was actually a writer for the essential computer user's publication.
There are still thousands of copies of CS sitting on geeky bookshelves all over the world. I wish I'd kept that November 1993 issue that I lugged home from the grocery store so many years ago, but I don't know what ever became of it. I have a copy from early 1997 that I get down and browse through and enjoy when I need a miniature in-cubicle vacation at work. It's fun reliving a time when 32 megs of RAM was an astronomically high amount that most home PC owners only dreamed about.
When the dot.com bust hit in Y2k, CS's size shrank dramatically. By 2009, it had shrunk to the size of a typical PC Magazine.
I am bookmarking Computer Shopper's site, and plan on making it a regular stopping place. I hope they continue to stick around and be successful for the foreseeable future.
One thing's for certain: they filled a very valuable niche in the late 80's throughout the 90's: the novice computer buyer's guide on how not to get ripped off.
