This website -- http://www.thecatalogblog.com -- looks back on old catalogs, and sometimes that means computer catalogs.
Their most recent post is a look at the "Whole Earth Software Catalog" from 1984 which I suppose was a child of the Whole Earth catalogs of the early 70s. I'd forgotten about this - more of a book than a catalog, really, but it was an interesting attempt to describe all the best software at that point in time...even if the 24 x 80 character-mode screen shots made all the programs look more similar than not.
The previous post was a page from an Edmund Scientific catalog of 1974 which described several "toy computers" like the Digi-comp 1...which was all most people could expect to see before 1975 and the Altair.
Their most recent post is a look at the "Whole Earth Software Catalog" from 1984 which I suppose was a child of the Whole Earth catalogs of the early 70s. I'd forgotten about this - more of a book than a catalog, really, but it was an interesting attempt to describe all the best software at that point in time...even if the 24 x 80 character-mode screen shots made all the programs look more similar than not.
The previous post was a page from an Edmund Scientific catalog of 1974 which described several "toy computers" like the Digi-comp 1...which was all most people could expect to see before 1975 and the Altair.