Can you explain? I'm sure you don't mean the phones can't call each other, but I'm struggling to think of what you _could_ mean then. All the messaging apps I can think of are on both Android and iPhone?
I truly could not have predicted that this is what it was. After someone above pointed it out, I actually searched online to verify they weren't joking.
Apparently 1.3B people like it! I have used many messengers over the years, starting with IRC in the 90s, then ICQ, Skype, FB messenger, Discord, Slack, Telegram, and of course countless forums. By 2012 or so everyone had an iPhone, and texting was really popular, so group chat emerged as a preferred method of communication between family and close friends and gradually group chats had formed within my extended family on 3 continents. Honestly I don’t see much difference between all the different messaging apps, so I just use whatever everyone else uses.
This is interesting. I had a dive into all this since I initially posted, and it seems this iMessage phenomena is a U.S.A. thing. iMessage is mostly unused in Europe, iPhone or not.
I don't care much for Whatsapp myself and prefer Signal, but I eventually gave up because life's too short for crusades.
Reading up on the iMessage adoption in the U.S.A. is like reading alternative-history fiction in Europe :P
He/she is likely referring to iMessage. If your friends are on iPhone, there is social pressure for you to get an iPhone so everyone can use iMessage. Otherwise, iPhones drop to very basic SMS/MMS support.
This is the one thing that makes me hate Apple with the fire of a thousand suns. I can't send a video message to my iphone friends without it looking like it came from 1995.
IMO, screw that. WhatsApp and a myriad of other messengers are perfectly free and cross-platform. Europe (or at least certain countries within Europe) seem to have largely escaped the stupid bubble colour classism of the American market. Possibly due to bad MMS support, so people just moved on to Internet messengers as soon as those got off the ground.
Screw that indeed, but in reality, here in the US/Canada, if you are dealing with a group of people who are 100% iPhone/iMessage, you have a pretty low chance of getting them all to switch to WhatsApp to accommodate you, the one lonely Android user who must be poor or stubborn or something.
Caveat: I successfully did it with one group of friends. Have completely failed in all other attempts.
I had to do some quick research to figure out if you were joking. Normally I'd say "meh, different strokes", but this seems more like everyone _had_ a stroke. Good lord :D
So cringey. Already such an obvious disconnect between the tech-savvy (the salesperson) and the customer. Or maybe this guy is just a bad salesperson (the first one).
It’s just because him or his family already had a PC. It was tribal. Remember it was a lot of money and people would natural want to justify that the decision they had made was the right one. It was not an straightforward choice at all.
I used to do this in high school and college. You develop an instinct for people.
There are people who you can educate to a certain extent who will convert to a sale given a patient conversation. Others were there to waste your time. This stuff was a lot of money and folks often didn’t have it, or didn’t understand what they were going to do with the computer. Other people would get a rise out of pretending to have money.
My normal technique was to hang out or approach people in a few specific areas and talk them through 2 computers. My goal was ~15m interaction if they weren’t moving down the funnel. No more.
That first guy is an ideal customer. He’s fishing for reasons to buy, as a sales dude, let him do the work, then drop the margin stuff (warranty, training, etc) at the end.
I really love watching 90s footage from malls, shoppingcenters or just some people walking in the city, it is somehow calming. If anyone knows some good youtubevideos like this from germany instead of the US please let me know.
Not the nice in-store video, but a page from an Allkauf Supermarket ad in 1995, with some of the computers on sale. No Amigas, though: https://youtu.be/z9Rb0L-xK8w?t=27
I agree about calming and I feel we were all much calmer overall in daily life. For this video I can see myself being in such stores, looking at all the computers, listening to adults talk as these people were, and it’s such a calmer environment. I worry about my kids as they seem too excited always. I know I wasn’t like them.
It was just more relaxed somehow. One part of it I think was that you just had to wait for things, not everything was available instantly, it teaches you patience.
You don’t think we have to wait for things now? It’s worse than ever. One of your appliances breaks down, 6 month wait for a part cause of covid supply issues… or so they say.
What I meant was more some sort of buying consumer stuff, like shiny new toys, videogames, things you don't really need. All those goods that are perfect for impulsive buying.
This is a 4:3 video. Why stretch it into 16:9 ? That's a throwback to the early 2000s when everyone was buying 16:9 TVs to watch stretched 4:3 sources. Drives me crazy, really.
My first guess is this could be Fry's store #3 in Palo Alto located on Portage Ave (closed in late 2019 [0]), but from the footage it's hard to be certain.
The shelving layout looks like the components section, which was behind the checkout area of the store. This was where you could buy discrete computer parts like motherboards, CPUs, memory, HDDs, cases, PSUs, network switches and cabling, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing, and tiny parts like capacitors and voltage regulators. Components was adjacent to the telephone and Appliances departments.
Where else in Palo Alto was there ever so much variety of inventory for sale? The Radio Shack in Downtown was tiny, and I don't recall Egghead computers in Menlo Park ever having even near that much inventory, but I was quite young at the time.
By the way, where was The Wiz located? I remember the tagline "Nobody beats the Wiz!", but it was founded in New Jersey [1] and don't recall such a store ever existing near Palo Alto (or the Bay Area). A bit tough to search for today thanks to the thorough marketing campaigns by a cyber security company sharing the same name.
holey moley I was that 10 year old in 1995 using the IBMs Thinkpads at Best Buy. I just made a video the other day on my Packard Bell. Thankfully, youtube has a transcript if it's too long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurK1m5Zz-g
I was in high school in the late nineties and I was looking forward to some nostalgia but this is hard to watch. I had kinda blocked from my memory that most people felt they needed a computer but didn’t know why. The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet. We still used the phone book as a primary source. Most people’s internet was through America Online and you stayed in their walled garden. They still bought computers out of fear of getting left behind. I did a lot of free IT work for friend’s parents in those days.
> The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet.
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
I think the implied statement was: the internet was so new, it wasn't essential to the general public yet.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
The first web browser that integrated text and graphic (Mosaic) was two years old but it was Netscape that really kicked things off with the general public.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
I washed so many cars as a preteen to afford a $30/mo SLIP connection.
PPP must have rolled out really fast or went through a few beta periods. I remember using it as early as ‘93. Our ISP gave you the option of SLIP or PPP when you dialed in.
> The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then...
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
The internet hasn't changed that much, only the scale of it. You could "watch videos downloaded off the internet" for a long time, but now we can access a massive library of 1080p video with zero buffer time. People don't appreciate how amazing YouTube really is.
Which means now we can be barred from owning (downloading) the videos. And be subject to algorithmic feeds and whatever dark UI patterns value extract our data most efficiently. :D Rentseeking++
> massive library of 1080p video with zero buffer time.
Yes but can you sit there and wait for several hours before accessing a grainy 240p clip of a whale being blown up, and then thinking it was the best thing ever for three days? Kids these days....
1968: waiting for new latest-technology vinyl records to come out from pop stars who were setting "records" for the number of millions sold per hit release
1978: copied selected vinyl to cassettes for portability
1988: copied selected CDs to cassettes next
1998: designed RIAA circuit for digitizing vinyl collection
2008: never did digitize much
2018: people are listening to vinyl all over again
This video exemplifies why Steve Jobs absolutely nailed it when he came back to Apple and simplified the product lineup and started selling out of Apple stores. These customers are confused with all of the available options and different processors and peripherals. Jobs simplified it to one device for consumers, the iMac, making it very easy for consumers to understand.
I also think part because he wasn’t thinking “computer” , he was thinking “appliance” , with the skeuomorphic interface to match. I would love to see more of that instead of the flat designs we see now.
Skeuomorphic designs made sense when people didn’t understand how things worked in the context of computers. Try asking a teenager what a Rolodex is or how to operate a tape deck now. :)
I like skeuomorphic designs much better, personally. There’s an argument to be made that they also offer more affordances than the normally featureless flat designs.
I agree aesthetically, but watching my daughter trying to learn interfaces with skeuomorphic design has been illuminating. Trying to explain to her that the save button is a blue rectangle with some gray stuff on the bottom for some reason (she has no idea what a “floppy disk” is) or the symbol for an inbox being a physical inbox, or contacts as a Rolodex or address book is starting completely from scratch. All of these things make intrinsic sense to me, because I learned those concepts when those physical objects existed in a meaningful form, but to her they’re completely meaningless. A desk calendar for a calendar interface would be just as opaque. So perhaps we need to reconsider what is or is not used for inspiration. An app that shows a drawing pad and tools is immediacy intuitive even to her, but when the corollaries are gone, where then do we go for the same effect?
Haha, I can imagine! For kids, you usually design different, including skeuomorphic. I am not a specialist on kids interface design, but I have seen some impressive demonstrations. Big buttons that speak, color coding, friendly characters guides and so on.
1994 or 1995? This video (with 13 extra seconds at the end) is also available on the same channel with another title (The Early Days of Computer Shopping: A 1994 Betacam SP Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eACEHVceYl0
I wonder if there is any detail that would support the fact that this video was filmed in 95 and in not 94.
I had a very similar job at a retail store called PC Club in Santa Ana, CA from 1995-1997. It was my first job, started when I was 14. I had a blue PC Club polo shirt and a pretty rad pony tail.
I was also a purely technical “sales” guy, just like the guy in the video. Could talk specs all day and repeat anecdotes about the differences between different vendors’ components. Had the worst sales numbers in the company because I only sold people the minimum of what they needed and did not understand the concept of revenue or profit margins. My adult colleagues were sometimes making 10X more than I was in commissions.
It was fun being in a small computer store during the era when the 486DX was hot stuff, SIMM RAM was transitioning to DIMM RAM. The Pentium was coming on the scene. Burning MP3s to CDs was popular. We played music at the store all day via a demo PC that was running WinAmp. Our tech support guys in the back were real techies. US Robotics 14.4 modems were cutting edge.
Luckily for me I found my way to a technical IT role when a PC Club customer hired me to help him with his local IT business. And then came full circle 14 years later to find out the hard way how important sales are when I started my first company.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadThis is either very ironic or Simpsons-level future prediction.
So uh, you guys _really_ like SMS, huh?
I don't care much for Whatsapp myself and prefer Signal, but I eventually gave up because life's too short for crusades.
Reading up on the iMessage adoption in the U.S.A. is like reading alternative-history fiction in Europe :P
Edit: more moderate phrasing
Caveat: I successfully did it with one group of friends. Have completely failed in all other attempts.
Second guy, hard-selling the PC....
It’s just because him or his family already had a PC. It was tribal. Remember it was a lot of money and people would natural want to justify that the decision they had made was the right one. It was not an straightforward choice at all.
There are people who you can educate to a certain extent who will convert to a sale given a patient conversation. Others were there to waste your time. This stuff was a lot of money and folks often didn’t have it, or didn’t understand what they were going to do with the computer. Other people would get a rise out of pretending to have money.
My normal technique was to hang out or approach people in a few specific areas and talk them through 2 computers. My goal was ~15m interaction if they weren’t moving down the funnel. No more.
That first guy is an ideal customer. He’s fishing for reasons to buy, as a sales dude, let him do the work, then drop the margin stuff (warranty, training, etc) at the end.
Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282081
* Less buying options
* No online shopping so the FOMO of a better deal is not there
* The staff actually knew what they were talking about and less salesy than they are today
The shelving layout looks like the components section, which was behind the checkout area of the store. This was where you could buy discrete computer parts like motherboards, CPUs, memory, HDDs, cases, PSUs, network switches and cabling, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing, and tiny parts like capacitors and voltage regulators. Components was adjacent to the telephone and Appliances departments.
Where else in Palo Alto was there ever so much variety of inventory for sale? The Radio Shack in Downtown was tiny, and I don't recall Egghead computers in Menlo Park ever having even near that much inventory, but I was quite young at the time.
By the way, where was The Wiz located? I remember the tagline "Nobody beats the Wiz!", but it was founded in New Jersey [1] and don't recall such a store ever existing near Palo Alto (or the Bay Area). A bit tough to search for today thanks to the thorough marketing campaigns by a cyber security company sharing the same name.
[0] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/12/27/the-era-of-fr...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz_(store)
I miss Fry's (¬_¬ ) - but not the shitty returns line, haha.
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
RFC1661 (PPP) was not formalized until July 1994.
PPP must have rolled out really fast or went through a few beta periods. I remember using it as early as ‘93. Our ISP gave you the option of SLIP or PPP when you dialed in.
What about the NeXT WWW browser?
https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/history/
Connecting a Windows computer to the Internet with Winsock didn't happen until the early 90s.
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
Yes but can you sit there and wait for several hours before accessing a grainy 240p clip of a whale being blown up, and then thinking it was the best thing ever for three days? Kids these days....
1978: copied selected vinyl to cassettes for portability
1988: copied selected CDs to cassettes next
1998: designed RIAA circuit for digitizing vinyl collection
2008: never did digitize much
2018: people are listening to vinyl all over again
I wonder if there is any detail that would support the fact that this video was filmed in 95 and in not 94.
I had a very similar job at a retail store called PC Club in Santa Ana, CA from 1995-1997. It was my first job, started when I was 14. I had a blue PC Club polo shirt and a pretty rad pony tail.
I was also a purely technical “sales” guy, just like the guy in the video. Could talk specs all day and repeat anecdotes about the differences between different vendors’ components. Had the worst sales numbers in the company because I only sold people the minimum of what they needed and did not understand the concept of revenue or profit margins. My adult colleagues were sometimes making 10X more than I was in commissions.
It was fun being in a small computer store during the era when the 486DX was hot stuff, SIMM RAM was transitioning to DIMM RAM. The Pentium was coming on the scene. Burning MP3s to CDs was popular. We played music at the store all day via a demo PC that was running WinAmp. Our tech support guys in the back were real techies. US Robotics 14.4 modems were cutting edge.
Luckily for me I found my way to a technical IT role when a PC Club customer hired me to help him with his local IT business. And then came full circle 14 years later to find out the hard way how important sales are when I started my first company.
Thanks for sharing this video.