How many remember Computer Shopper and The Hard Edge

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I was sitting at the PC thios morning, checking email and catching up on AskWoody.com, and for some reason, my mind surfaced the term, “Lab of Doom and Pepsi-Cola.”  It popped up like a tech flashback.  At the time I could not remember which magazine it was in, so I consulted the web, which led me down the rabbit hole into the past and dropped me into the lost realms of “Computer Shopper” magazine.

Computer Shopper was a massive, oversized, phonebook thick magazine back in the 1990s.  It was often 1.5 inches thick and was mostly ads (probably 80%), with some tech information.  It was equally a bible, a wishbook and great tool for comparative PC shopping in the pre-internest and early pre-‘commercial’ internet days.  I do remember the first time I accessed the internet (mostly text) via the Mosaic browser over a fast 2400b modem.  At that time online was largely via BBS (bulletin board) software to various Bulletin Boards included with dial-up modems.

Computer Shopper has a wild column called The Hard Edge, by a male/female duo, Alice Hill and Bill O’Brien.  Bill’s domain was his Lab of Doom and Pepsi-Cola.  The name for me, as a Doom fanatic was great, but not as a Coke fan.  The articles were often hilarious.

Here are a few.  https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17930615.html

My wife at the time started to call my PS room “the lab”, but that was brief as her term, “Command Central” took over.  PCs were divided then.  You had the (relatively) tightly controlled work PC (mine was a screaming 286 with 640K of RAM and COLOR monitor) and the freedom of the home PC with its 486DX-33 CPU, a massive 340MB HDD, 1MB video card, and 8MB of RAM, which was the home of Doom, a game unlike any at that time.  It was a MS-DOS 6 box with a Windows 3.1 install.  My word processor was WordPerfect 6 for DOS for reliability reasons.  How things have changed.  I for one, do not miss updating a Diamond videocard driver and after 2 weeks finally finding out that was why the HP inkjet printers started to have black lines on the page.  Early and prime lesson, NEVER update multiple drivers at one time – a practice I still use.

We now return control of your AskWoody experience back to the present, to the the front lines of the Patch Wars, and to the battle for retension of user control, freedom and ownership of their computers.  Avoid Assimilation!

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HiFlyer, Elly

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Yes I remember Computer Shopper, it was massive, true. Byte magazine was always an interesting read even if some stuff was over my head.

I remember my former company’s first CAD station. IBM PS/2 Model 70, 286 12MHz, 1 MB RAM, 70 MB HDD, dual scan VGA/1024×768 15″ monitor. We had to add an external 5-1/4″ drive for the AutoCAD 360k install diskettes! That, the 36″ wide HP pen plotter, 24×36 digitizing tablet and software was around 20k…30?..something like that! We purchase another half MEG of RAM for about $500 and replaced the 70MB HDD with a 70 MB OEM  drive for about $1600! My have times changed! Yeah, and that 70 meg was not all usable. The largest partition was 32 MB, so 3 partitions.

A young man..22…24..we hired for our IT dept was saying about starting to use computers when he was 8. I said my first CAD machine was in 1988! “I guess you weren’t born then.” I didn’t mention my first computer experience was in 1974 at a typewriter terminal over an acoustic coupler. Dialed…yes dialed…the phone and jammed the receiver into the coupler.

Now we carry hand held computers in our pockets that happen to have a phone app.

--
So long and thanks for all the fish --Douglas Adams 1952-2001

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Elly

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