Supremetronic Redux

Tue Sep 4 15:21:59 UTC 2012

| From: phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org

Thanks for this posting: lots of memories and some new things about
old places.

And it started a great thread.

| Supremetronic ended up at Honson computer on College, just west of
| Spadina, where it was pretty terrible as I recall.

I'm trying to remember: was Honson's the one that combined with
Mother's Sandwich Shop?  Mother's was a favourite from the 1970's.
They had a Volkswagen with a Rolls Royce grill as a delivery vehicle.

| Speaking of electronics stores, on Saturday I happened to be in the
| Factory Direct at 1399 Kennedy (Tacky Kennedy, as some TLUGer put it).
| Man, what a dive. They make a dollar store look like Holt Renfrew. But
| there were a lot of people in there..

As noted elsewhere, they've diversified into left over As Seen On TV
crap.  Sometimes they have something of interest, but the price isn't
usually that good.

| And Above All seems to still be in play - now out in Korea Town, south
| side of Bloor.

As a scavenger, I found their prices high.  But if I treated them as
outsourcing my basement (i.e. so I don't have to save everything that
might some day be useful), it would be a tremendous bargain.  Old
habits are hard to kill.

| From: James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>

|   There were more stores along College back then.

Remember Exceltronics?  A big hole when they disappeared.

I could not believe that a Dot Matrix printer (A Gemini 10X) could be
less than $400 (1982).  The printer's gone; I'm just trying to pitch
the manual now.

|  Also, going back
| many years ago, there were several stores on Yonge St, between College &
| Wellesley, including Electrosonic.

In about 1982 I bought a Z80a from some store / distributor near
there. I just don't remember the name (Future?).  I used it to
overclock my Kaypro II to 4Mhz.

I was thrilled and amazed by the first computer store I remember in
Toronto (1975).  I forget it's name, but it was in a house on
Gloucester (parallel to Wellesley, a few streets north) between Yonge
and Church. They sold these cute Poly 88 computers and lots of other
things
<http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=563>
An early S100 that didn't have switches and lights.

|  Back in the '80s, I bought a bare S-100
| bus prototyping board from Active Surplus, along with a bunch of parts and
| designed and built an 8 port serial card for my IMSAI 8080.  I also bought a
| 300 baud manual modem from one of those stores on Queen.  Computers were more
| fun back then.  :-)

I was in Waterloo in the early 1980s.  I bought a 64k RAM board for my
Altair at a reputable chain for a bargain price.  Turned out that the
design was a ever-so-slightly photo-reduced clone of a mainstream
board.  So I had to place it just right so that all the fingers
actually matched the S100 socket!  Those sure were the days.

| BTW, anyone here remember TRACE (Toronto Region Association of Computer
| Enthusiasts)?

I never went to a meeting, but I saw a few traces of them (eg.
newsletters).

| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| Not to mention the basement full of O'Reilly and other Unix manuals at
| the College location.

The supply seemed to be very static.  Perhaps they only got one big
lump, perhaps from the bankruptcy of some distributor.

| From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| I was always of two minds about that...
| 
| On the one hand, I was all, "squeee!   Cheap books that I sorta want!"

Yeah.  I try to convince myself that my time reading is worth more
than I save by stockpilin a possibly inferior book.  I fail.

| On the other hand, the only way to have a basement full of
| spectacularly discounted books is for that basement of spectacularly
| discounted books to be considered effectively commercially worthless,
| which bodes ill for the continued production of such books.

Not sure.  While the boom was on, books were ephemeral.  The part of
this we are observing is that there was an awesome supply of
remainders.  The upside (for publishers) was that they could
frequently sell replacements to customers who had bought books that
became obsolete.

Those short-shelf-life books were almost never to my taste.  But
someone must have bought them.

Now the internet provides all the ephemeral content you want, fresh
(half?)  baked.

| And the "tech book" section at the average bookstore has indeed become
| a pale shadow of what it was 15 years ago.

Yeah.  This is where ebooks make sense.  Maybe.  If the nexus ideas
that the book embodies makes make sense (a static delineated canonical
linear chunk of knowledge and presentation).

O'Reilly's books are of less interest to me these days, but they seem
to have a 50% off ebooks sale at the moment.  Get Ian Darwin's Android
book.
<http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/b2s-2012-special.do?imm_mid=093a4b&cmp=em-npa-books-videos-b2s-direct-value3-winner>
No DRM!

ebooks should mean no remainders (books printed but not sold,
discounted to clear, no royalty to author).  There can be discounts,
of course, since the marginal cost is near zero.

| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

|  The great thing about older Unix books is their incredible
| shelf life. I still use reference books from the 1990s for topics that
| never quite get committed to memory.

I'm not sure.  I have a room full of this stuff and yet I find myself
googling instead of picking up a book.

And the Linux folks really are changing a lot of the plumbing.

| Don't worry, it's likely to close next year:
| http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1214719--toronto-s-world-s-biggest-bookstore-slated-to-close-in-2013

Sad.  But it's been a long time since I found much of value there.

When Indigo / Chapters closed their book distributor, they dumped a
lot of academic titles.  Like vultures, we spent hours looking through
the rubble.

Someone next to my daughter said derisively about a latex book "why would anyone
want this?".  When she put it down, my daughter pounced.  Both kids
have used it.  But nobody here has yet read "The Calcium Ion Channel".

| While I love bookstores (and treasured my too-few visits to Foyle's in
| London, which had compendious stock and stupendously rude staff),
| they're just Amazon showrooms now.

Try Hay on Wye <http://www.hay-on-wye.co.uk/bookshops/>

| From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| I watched the "crash" from pretty close on in 2002-2003; was doing
| some review work for Wrox back at that time, when they effectively
| imploded.  Around 2000, all kinds of publishers were pushing out crazy
| amounts of stuff, particularly in the technical book arena.

The model has evolved, I guess.  Paper books are probably not the
optimal medium for ephemeral information.  Book stores are probably
not the optimal delivery model.  But some useful things are lost when
they go.

There is something that appeals to me in a non-rational way about
physical books (and physical artifacts in general).

We live in a disposable world, and I'm not cut out for it.
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