Thick As a Brick 🧱
Issues of the famed computer magazine Computer Shopper are not, in fact, thick enough to prevent a bullet going through them.
Hello again, time for another Lesser Tedium, a small portion of the book-length Tedium. Want to get the main 800-page experience? Subscribe to the main thing, which you can do over this way.
The magazine Computer Shopper may be the biggest magazine ever produced by sheer width, and that’s not hyperbole.
Currently, Jason Scott, the Free Range Archivist for the Internet Archive, is taking on a pretty wild endeavor—he is working to scan in dozens of issues of the magazine, effectively a massive collection of ads with a small amount of editorial. During its best-known period before about 1995 or so, these things were the size of phone books.
This is not an easy task—he has only completed a single issue from the “glory years” thus far, and there are many more to go.
(As he posted on Mastodon, he hopes future issues go faster now that he’s learned a bit about the process of scanning a magazine of this nature. “Tons of points were learned doing this, so expect the next ones to rock harder,” he wrote.)
It may be perhaps the most famous technology magazine that the Archive has not stored in full, in part because the issues are literally monstrous.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who wrote for Computer Shopper during its glory years, recalled an attempt by the magazine’s editors to test how impenetrable the book actually was:
Once upon a time, at a Comdex, when Comdex was the trade show of trade shows, some of Shopper’s editors and writers went to a Las Vegas gun range with a pile of issues.
Now, you need to remember in those days, a single copy of Computer Shopper, was a couple of inches thick and weighted more than a pound. Despite that though there was, as [Shopper senior editor Dan] Rosenbaum recalled, “general surprise when we discovered that even the thickest Shopper couldn’t stop even a .22—but a .45 made a spectacular pile of newsprint confetti.”
The magazine began to change in the late ’90s and early 2000s, as the internet displaced all those ads with actual web pages, but held on until 2009.
» Wanna learn more? I wrote a history of the famed magazine back in 2015, and then followed it up with a piece on its most famous advertiser, Gateway 2000.