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Hard Goodbye to Alice and Bill
cuzality writes "Computer Shopper has decided to let 'The Hard Edge' go after twelve years and two months of 'edgy, sarcastic, reader-centric columns' by Alice and Bill. Many of us remember 'The Hard Edge' from all the way back when it was in the newsprint section of the inch-thick Computer Shopper, and it's always been the straight skinny direct from the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola. Though 'The Hard Edge' has met its untimely and abrupt end, Alice and Bill aren't splitting up: they will continue on together at AliceandBill.com, where they write about technology news and will be happy to accept your kind PayPal donation." (More below.)
"They are also signing up subscribers for an upcoming newsletter, but since they can't use the name 'The Hard Edge' (which is owned by C|Net, CS's parent company), they will have to use some alternate name, possibly 'Hedge Yard.' If you were loyal 'Hard Edge' reader, drop by and write them a nice note in their guestbook."
Taken from dreambook.com:
Name: Michael Franklin
Homepage URL: http://snmmedia.com
Comments: Hi Guys,
I have been reading your column ever since you had a column. I was saddened when I read that your latest column would be your last. I emailed Computer Shopper to voice my support for you and tell them I would never read their publication again and in fact, would probably use my existing pages of CS for some sort of nefarious activity involving dog poop.
I won't uses the pages of your column for puppy pages though, but it is an apt metaphor for how I feel right now. Like CS pooped on us all.
I donated to the cause and have bookmarked your site. You guys are the best and I hope to hear more of your unbiased opinions in the future.
Friday, October 8th 2004 - 01:15:52 PM
Well, as much as I loved computer shopper back in the early 1990s I stopped reading it somewhere in the late 1990s. I saw it recently on a magazine rack and was quite disappointed to see it being thin and boring. I loved to spend hours pouring over its pages looking for deals and daydreaming of the best computer I could buy on my budget. I enjoyed them because they were different not because they were the same. They offered something that made them stand out against all the other magazines. Why they would change formats to be like everyone else I'll never know.
CS didn't let you down when they dropped Alice and Bill's article they let you down years ago when they changed formats. From what I read online I can only imagine that this will continue the downhill slide that CS has taken since I stopped reading it all those years ago.
I think you're doing the trees that were sacraficed so that I might find great deals on 386 notebooks a great injustice.
they will continue on together at AliceandBill.com, where they write about technology news and will be happy to accept your kind PayPal donation."
::imagines geeks on the corner with "Will review for food" signs::
So they're eBums?
PayPal donation eh? Some earlier story suggests otherwise.
You man people still read ComputerShopper?
Back in the day, when computer parts weren't for sale at your local supermarket - back when you had to go to a special store just to be diskettes - ComputerShopper filled a need.
Barely.
It was always a bear to find, say, all ads for tape drives, and to compare the prices of each vendor. It was a PAIN to locate anything special - you spent more time than it was worth to flip through the 8000 pages of ads to find the ones selling what you want.
Now, you go to [Google/Froogle/Yahoo/eBay/...] and type in a quick search, and there you are.
Next you'll tell me that there are still people reading Byte!
www.eFax.com are spammers
will be happy to accept your kind PayPal donation. ... just as soon as it comes back online.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...and Alfred Poor. I think this goes off my list now.
Oh, well, there's always Maximum PC.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
I've read CS from time to time over the years and never noticed that column. Is there really a large following, or was this just a last ditch attempt to get some attention and money by this Alice and Bill?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
As a previous poster pointed out, CS disappointed LONG ago. But I have memories of my lean years in college (in more ways than one), where, if I bought ONE magazine, it was CS, and if I bought it for ONE reason, it was to read The Hard Edge. And sometimes for Poor's Computer Cures. But it was the Hard Edge, along with the endless ads, that gave CS its trademark flavor. I have long since stopped even looking at CS -- let alone buying it -- since it stopped being its unique self, and tried to mold itself into a more traditional computer magazine. Don't we have enough of those already?
Just because I know I didn't say it enough (OK, OK, I NEVER said it...):
Thanks, Bill and Alice (or Alice and Bill?), for teaching me about computers by guiding me past the marketing hype.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Come on, people, do you really _want_ 1000 pages of Computer Shopper, instead of browsing at any number of online searchable sites? I think pricewatch completely destroyed any need for an outdated, heavy, tiny print dead tree publication. Don't get me wrong... I miss computer shopper too, but nostalgically, not for it's uses.
That said, Alice and Bill had a great column, which I did read religiously. Unfortunely, it wasn't enough to motivate me to buy the entire magazine.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
It is actually Alice and Bob, but there was some problem communicating that info in a reliable manner.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
That's what I always hated about it. Even before much product information was available online, I couldn't see the need to pay $5 for a big book of ads and almost no content. Why didn't the vendors pay to have their products promoted? If they did, somebody was making a big fat pile of cash on that magazine. That's probably why it overstayed its welcome by so long.
I bought my first 386 through CS: 1MB RAM, monochrome monitor, conner 200something HD. I called the company back later to get a price check on a soundcard and the guy yelled at me -- he was stressed or something and only took purchases, no price check cowboy! I think the name of the company was Hitek or something. Later, my buddy paid waaay too much for a 486 through a company in CS called "Legacy Computers" I think it was. They promptly went out of business and so did his warranty.
/. reader should be surprised by the death of any paper-based technical periodical, especially one replaced by the modern, searchable, web....
CS was a mammoth book of companies that apparently did not have to meet any criteria. The present online way of doing business with sellers, being able to check their consumer ratings, etc., is how it should be.
No
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Kinda strange.
Computer shopper used to have hundreds of pages, and they weren't littl 8-1/2" by 11" pages. This was a BIG book...
HUGE ads. Remember those Viewsonic birds? Full page, in color. 21" monitors for $2000. Pages of RAM, CPU, motherboards, floppy drives, keyboards. Bargains all over. Giant Dell and Gateway Ads, Micron, Midwest Micro.
I would honestly buy a couple back issues if I could find some on eBay. They're like computer time machines. Mine were all thrown out as pages were highlighted, torn out, and became dog eared.
Truly an icon of the PC industry in the early 90's.
Now, with sites like Pricewatch, and everyone and their brother selling PC parts at low cost, they've basically faded into just another junk computer magazine. 60-70 regular size pages. The last one I read covered video cards and 'case mods'. Basically a 'PC World'. The internet killed computer magazines, especially those like Computer Shopper.
I think the web killed them though, along with consolidation in the clone market. Microsoft can be fairly blamed here as they made sure that with the onset of Windows, that writing drivers to their specifications was required to sell a system. Obvious advantages in mass-production were the result and the extinction of niche clone makers quickly followed.
No more going to the Chinese guy in the industrial park to buy systems. I remember my first trip there back in the 80s when I had a 286 board that wasn't working with my SIPPs, this guy threw my board on a pile of DOA boards and ripped out a new one, mounted 1MB of RAM on it and sent me on my way. Woohoo! That was CS at work.
CS was the heart of the hobbyist market of the 80s and early 90s. Drilling holes in toner cartridges and punching holes in floppy disks is long gone, as is building your own system as a common endeavor. CS' time has passed.
I never liked the Hard Edge much anyway - they devoted too many pages to that. I would have preferred general interest stuff rather, more hole drillings and hardware mods!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well I can tell that my mailman/person has gotten much happier as CS has decreased in size. I remember him one time complaining about how big it was and that it accounted for 1/3 or so of his mail bag weight. I told him that I got all the neighbors gift subscriptions. There was a slight bit of panic for a second til he realized I was kidding.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
You can get ripped off just as easily today. Back then, you used word of mouth to find out who was good and who was not. I had great success dealing with reputable companies that advertised in CS.
The reason why the guy yelled at you was because the Computer Shopper pricing models were cutthroat. The price checks were often done by competing retailers so they could undercut someone else - even by a buck - in print. There was a 3 month lag back then between ad submission and print. You see the issue.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
They alienated 95% of the population with that title.
Everyone knows that IT geeks only drink Diet Coke and Mountain Dew!
I worked for an outfit here in Virginia Beach called "Galaxy Computers" about a decade ago. It was a russian couple essentially trying to exploit Americans. While they weren't a total ripoff-- they made an effort to ship things honestly, but FORGET about returns and refunds. There were two competitors locally who both were CS companies, but they were related somehow.. It was strange, kind a like a "russan mafia" thing...
I liked it because I could get stuff at "cost" I remember proudly buying a 166 mhz pentium for "only" $800. Yikes. Aah to be 17 and living with my parents again...
The boss actually took a liking to me when I wrote a defensive (and successful) letter to the BBB when we had a genuinely unrealistic customer. A few weeks later, he asked me to write another letter based upon a complaint, but I refused, because this person had a legitamite complaint. Sasha then informed me "They you quit!" I said, "No, I'm still working here. If you want me to leave, then you fire me." "NO, YOU QUIT!"
Anyway, I think I worked for two more days before he actually fired me, which is the only job from which I've ever been canned..
It's also the only job I've ever had a paycheck refused at a bank.. (and when that happened they paid in cash) But it was fun trying to find people the best deals, and put systems together. I genuinely loved building computers from parts, (still do) and I took pride in talking to people and finding out what they wanted. I'm nostalgic for the big CS book, and that's carried over. I now pride myself on finding the absolute best deals on stuff for friends using froogle/ pricegrabber/ pricwatch/ slickdeals/ techbargains/ half.com/ you name it, but it will never have the nostalgia of pouring over those pages, circling, dogearing, and calculating shipping costs...
I also periodically get "one year free trial offers" for it, and therefore have never paid for it. Yes, they want a credit card number for "automatic" renewal. I usually have at least one old card around from when I last took a "introductory 0.99% life-of-loan no-fee balance transfer!!!!!" offer up. I feed that number in, cancel the card when the first magazine arrives, and ignore any renewal notices I get. I have one less piece of plastic to keep track of, one more bank who desperately wants to offer me silly things to use their credit card, and some free reading material. Since trash removal is included in my rent, no problem for me. Not so good for the people giving me free magazines, but that's also no problem for me.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Computer Shopper went down the tubes when Ziff-Davis bought it from Stan Veit, told all the "classic computer" columnists to buzz off, and turned it into a PClone-only rag.
As has been copiously noted, it lost its only remaining function when it became far easier to get far more up-to-date data on the Web. I'm not sure whether I saved any of the 1000+ page issues from the era when I called it "Deforestation Monthly," but it's sad to see it now at about 170 pages. The date of its demise can't be that far off.
Way back in the late 80's up to the mid 90's, when web shopping was non existent or at its infancy and you can only get stuff mostly thru mail order, CS was the Bible. I used to enjoy reading CS cover to cover looking at comparisons of PCs, scanners, hard drives, image editing software, etc. I also enjoyed reading Hard Edge by Alice and Bill in their lab of Doom. Sadly, CS is now but a parody of its former self... made nearly useless by NewEgg, Amazon, etc., on the shopping front and by sites such as AnandTech, Tom's, HardOCP, etc., on the hardware analysis front.
I am actually surprised CS/Hard Edge lasted this long... such is the furious pace of progress specially in tech... almost everything will be rendered obsolete sooner or later.
I remember reading it back in the late 1980s. Page after page of enticing computers and equipment at prices I could not afford! There used to be sections on various models, such as Apple, Atari, and so on. Didnt Don Lancaster write a column in there too? In the back was for sale and wanted sections for computer types listed in alphabetical order most of which are not with us anymore. I enjoyed looking at the Apple // clones and parts available to build your own and I remember a review they had on the Basis-108. There was also lots of BBS numbers to attempt to connect to. I saw some of these old rags in a used bookstore once and wished I bought them just for old times sake.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Not only did I have a sub to both CS and Byte, but I frequented the compuserve CS forum, where Bill talked mostly about his Camaro. My only claim to fame is that I got a letter printed in Hard Edge, detailing my regrets with OS/2, the OS I tried so hard to love.
First - thank you to EVERYONE who said they liked the column. We loved doing it and still are reeling from the decision to replace us with a shopping section of products and prices. And to the person who said this news item was done as a cheap ploy to get PayPal donations - we wish! The %$%% site is down. Guess this isn't out month. But thanks to all, and I hope you'll check out Aliceandbill.com. We are funding it ourselves for Hard Edge readers and post every day, so we hope you'll like it. We are also "in talks" with a few mags about a new print home as well, so stay tuned.....Alice Hill
That is true, the Hard Edge was named and writted by Rich Santalesa and Dave Harvey. We inherited the column when they left to start a magazine. Rich actually created the whole Shopper "Tech Section" which at the time had great articles on programming, and early pre Web stuff by Steven J. Vaugh Nichols, and of course Stan Veit's great "Whatever happened to..." column. (Stan has been so supportive since this happened.) The Tech Section when I was running it after Rich left was almost 35 pages or almost the entire size of an average magazine. Those Shopper pages were huge too, but we could run longer articles back when it was a phone book. The original Hard Edge was actually a whopping 4,000 words but finally got chopped to 1,800. It was hard to not have the room to do the weird charts and in-depth stuff we used to be able to do with all that space. But I think we managed to keep in some of the humor. It sure was fun to write. --Alice Hill
The evolution (devolution) of Computer Shopper fits the natural way computer magazines have always progressed (regressed), a phenomenon that predates the Internet by many years (I was griping about it as early as 1983 when it happened to the likes of Creative Computing and InfoWorld).
Normally, computer magazines start out being of, by, and for enthusiasts / hobbyists / "geeks", and are interestingly quirky as a result, but over the years they gradually become more "mainstream", slick, and corporate, with editorial policies dictated by the advertisers (and, specifically, the ones who buy full-page, full-color ads, not mom-and-pop classifieds) rather than the desires of the current readers (the management starts pining after the holy grail of a huge mainstream readership they hope to find if their content can be made more acceptable to Corporate America).
Usually, they fail to get this mass readership or the big ad dollars it's supposed to produce, so they go out of business in the end; maybe they could have survived if they kept their original format and a budget based on a cult-following audience instead of pipe dreams of something bigger.
--Dan
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