When I first moved out to the Bay Area in 1995 and discovered Fry's it was wire-wrapping tools, sockets, enclosures, electronic components, porn magazines, junk food, soft drinks, Computer Shopper magazines....
The articles in Computer Shopper were pretty much fairly low effort filler. Not that there weren’t tons of ads in things like PC Magazine but the articles/columns/reviews were of pretty good quality for the most part.
While the point of the articles was to keep it legally qualified as a "magazine" rather than a "catalog" (as postal rates then favored the former over the latter), there were some good things there. Don Lancaster wrote some amazing articles about Postscript and how you can write Postscript code to make figures rather than using a drawing program. And Stan Veit, who was editor of Computer Shopper for a time, wrote some good history articles about the early personal computer scene in the 1970s (Veit had opened in 1976 the first computer store in NYC, and one of the first in the USA as a whole)
Fair. I had forgotten about Don Lancaster, probably because that was never an area of particular interest. Mostly only bought Computer Shopper if I were building a PC or something like that.
You could literally purchase a bag of chips (SIMMs) on one aisle, and a bag of chips (Fritos) in another!
I must admit that “Big Boob Babes” was my favorite CD-ROM purchase in 1994. No, it was not a DVD
This morning, I was just watching the video of “The Distance” by Cake, and I vividly recall when that was released and played on my car radio, and the metaphor of corporate slavery was not lost on 24-year-old me.
My favorite store was the one with the Mesoamerican temples and stuff.
