PC Magazine didn't have anything on Computer Shopper when you wanted to figure out the best price on a PC. Imagine over a thousand pages of newsprint, with about 850 of them being 100% ads.
It's hard to grep a dead tree, of course.
The best thing was that Computer Shopper could afford to print decent articles -- Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on the first PC UNIXen, cool things to do by writing PostScript to your printer -- after PC Magazine started thinking that those things were too geeky for their business-focused audience. (Six word-processors under $1495 compared!)
I regret throwing out my old Computer Shopper magazines. Their form factor was sub-optimal for long term storage, but they would be a ton of fun to look through today.
I found one! Computer Shopper, December 1997: "Holiday Hit! $2,499 - fully loaded 300 MHz Pentium II"
Also two J&R catalogs, winter 1998 and the orher's undated. And an OS/2 Warp Demonstration Disk 3 1/2" floppy, and various other floppies, 5 1/4" included.
Edit: ah, I was going to take the CS to the Internet Archive to scan, but the size might be a problem for their scanners. Thoughts?
I really miss the giant newsprint-digest format of the 80's and 90's. I have fond memories of Computer Shopper, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Shonen Jump. The first electronics project I ever did (with help) was from an article in Computer Shopper on controlling an RC car via parallel port and LPT instructions.
It's hard to grep a dead tree, of course.
The best thing was that Computer Shopper could afford to print decent articles -- Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on the first PC UNIXen, cool things to do by writing PostScript to your printer -- after PC Magazine started thinking that those things were too geeky for their business-focused audience. (Six word-processors under $1495 compared!)