[tocs3]

The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange.

I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...

Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".

No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.

[kens]

I remember the big 1977-1979 scam with DataSync, World Power Systems, and "Colonel David Winthrop" advertising S-100 boards and other computer stuff but not shipping it to purchasers while also ripping off his suppliers. The article mentions Colonel Whitney (not Winthrop) for some reason

Interesting article on it: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-powe...

[cfmcdonald]

Author here. Thank you for the reference, this is very helpful. The name "Colonel Whitney" came from a 1984 Stan Veit article: https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/computer_magazine_madness...

Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.

[ToucanLoucan]

That quote bugs me a little because it presumes that mail order hadn't existed before then, that it was some sort of "act of faith." Sears was selling whole ass houses via the mail in the early 1900's, that's where the term "Craftsman home" came from; it's literally the then-owned-by-Sears brand.

[Teever]

Yeah but Sears is a reputable company selling reputable brands that became so ubiquitous as to enter into the lexicon.

That's miles apart from some fly by night catalogue with ads from Jim Bob selling what was only a decades prior the domain of science fiction and corporate offices.

Like look at it another way. If some fly by night website was selling what they claimed was a desktop replicator for $5000 and someone posted it on Hackernews the top comment would be about how the website isn't responsive and the language is in broken english and somewhere towards the bottom would be a flame war started by some curious person saying "I'm gonna go for it. I just bought it."

[quesera]

> that's where the term "Craftsman home" came from

FWIW, this etymology is incorrect. The American Craftsman architecture style was a derivative of the British Arts & Crafts movement, post Victorian era.

Timeline is roughly: Arts & Crafts circa 1880, American Craftsman circa 1900.

The Sears Craftsman brand was created in 1927.

[bityard]

Yes, but there was still fraud. You didn't send your money away to just any random ad you ran across. Sears was VERY well known. And if you didn't know the company or its reputation, you likely wouldn't send your money away to buy something without at _least_ hearing a positive experience from someone you know and trust.

MITS was not unknown, but they were not a household name. And any microcomputer at that time was quite an expensive toy. Costing an amount that a lot of people could not really afford to just lose.

[WillAdams]

The difference here is that orders placed by USPS mail were subject to mail fraud regulations _and enforcement_ --- that was _not_ in place for early internet ordering.

My kids were quite amazed when they found my copy of a book whose approximate title was _Specialty Mail Order Catalogs_, which is apparently so obscure I'm not finding it on Goodreads or Abebooks --- will have to check the ISBN the next time it comes up and add it to the former.

[AStonesThrow]

My father's stereo system was installed in our living room, a Heathkit with discrete components, probably a tube-transistor hybrid type. I did not witness him in the process of assembling it.

But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.

It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.

It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.

Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.

One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.

Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.

[UncleSlacky]

> The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades.

I had one of those, though I knew what I was getting (from Edmund Scientific Catalog).

[ghaff]

I loved that catalog as a kid. American Science and Surplus is probably its spiritual descendent if not quite the same thing.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Edmund at least held on to the non-professional side of its optics business through Anchor Optical Supply. But yeah, I miss paging through the original catalogs. I think I still have the "How to make a Telescope" book although I lost the mirror blank several moves ago.

[CalRobert]

Once upon a time I actually bought (and sold!) stuff on ebay (or rather, auctionweb, at ebay.com/aw, the auctions were only a part of the site!) with postal money orders. After all, a fraudster would be caught out by bad feedback! The internet felt a lot cozier then.

[segmondy]

In the mid 90's I sent about $200 in money order to Nigeria to buy a bunch of cassette tapes from some random internet person and what would you know? 2 months later, I had 50 tapes at my doorstep.