BookStore
Visit the bookstore:
Computer Books Online has been serving the Internet community since 1997. We carry 1000s of computer books, and that’s the only kind of books we carry, because we’re not just about books, we’re about technology.
We’re into tech.
How Computer Books Online Came to Be
(or How to Make This Page Longer, So it Won’t Look so Empty)
Way back in 1997, I bought my first computer and fell in love! Up until then, I had always said I didn’t need a $2000 machine to balance my checkbook. Little did I know.
Got A Computer
One day, I went to BestBuy and called my programmer-nephew with specs on the various computers. I eventually bought a Packard Bell Pentium 70ghz with a 1.2 g harddrive and a floppy drive.
He said, “1.2 gig!” Being an old-school-save-every-k-possible-kind-of-programmer, he told me, “You won’t fill that in your lifetime!” It toook 3 months, baby, 3 months. I bought a printer for $400 and a scanner for $500 (or was it the other way around?), and I was good to go.
Got Online
I tried Compuserve first, as my online service, but it wasn’t very user-friendly, so I ended up on AOL, paying $3.95 an hour to surf (OMG). I was in 7th heaven! I felt like the world had been opened up to me. Actually, it had. AOL opened up some international chat rooms, and I “talked” with someone from England, and eventually people from all corners of the world. I visited the Library of Congress, and I watched wild animals use a watering hole in Africa on a webcam. It was amazing!
Got Greedy
Before too long, the old entrepreneurial spirit in me showed up.
Make a business out of this new love of yours, it said. The internet is becoming mainstream. Get in that flow and make some dough.
I knew it was going to be big. So I made a plan to sell computers online. Hardware, software, books, and magazines. And maybe novelties.
Getting Good
I was rapidly becoming a tech-jack-of-all-trades (master of none). I built em. I repaired em. Troubleshot them. (is troubleshooted a word?) Mastered all kinds of software, learned a little programming, some computer architecture, webmastering - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I was a kind of a natural at it. Actually, my plan was to learn EVERYTHING. Little did I know.
And Everybody Found Out.
Can you come over and install that new 56k modem I bought from you?
Well, sure! I’d be happy to.
And can you show me how to delete some of the stuff off of my computer? And where things go when I download them? I download things and then I can’t find them. Oh, and whenever I open this program, my mouse stops working. Can you fix that? And since you’ve spent like 5 hours at my house doing all of this, why don’t you just stay for dinner? And after that, there’s a couple more things I’d like to have you look at.
Or like the guy who had me follow him to his car in our work parking lot. He opened the trunk and proudly showed me a 386 computer that he had purchased at a garage sale for $8. He wanted me to soup it up for him, and make it run like the then-currently-popular Pentium 2. Oh brother!
Changed the Plan
I realized that my suppliers had - well, my smallest supplier had - over 80,000 items in stock. Another had 120,000. Plus 2 others with even more. And since I had just come into this scene in 1997, rather late in the game by some standards, and I was not going to know which of those 80,000 items was compatible with which others, and even when I DID know what I was doing, it was taking hours and hours to get people satified, plus, I was reading on the net about how much fraud there was on sites that sold computer parts, so I decided that maybe I should start just with the books. (Did you notice how long that sentence was?) I wouldn’t have to know which book was compatible with which. You wanta know Java? Here’s what we got. This one’s old, this one just came out. Your choice. Hey!
Got a Name
So I made my new plan and started working it. I thought about a name for the site. I finally settled on The HackShack. I mean, authors are sometimes called hackers, and then there’s computer hackers, which I was looking at as a good thing - a hacker, not a cracker - so it seemed like a good fit. And the domain was available.
Ok, that was settled, so I moved on to next task — but when I came back 3 months later, the domain had been registered. I couldn’t believe it! Who, in their right mind, would want the word Hack in their biz name? (other than me?)
Well, who wanted it was a store on the east coast called - da ta da - the HackShack. I mean, they were bricks-and-mortar, and it really was their name, so of course they should have it. But now I had to come up with something else. I pretty much had everything else ready to go, and all I needed to do was register a name and get the site up.
Everything I came up with was taken. I started feeling a lot of pressure, and finally found one that wasn’t taken - computerbooksonline.com. I grabbed it. Later, it dawned on me that it was toooo much like America Online. Sounded sort of copy-cattish. Oh well, too late now.
But you know what? I couldn’t have picked a better name. Even if I had paid an advertising company a million bucks to come up with something. You have no idea how many people have seached for those generic words over the years - computer books online.
Although! I would advise people to pick as short a domain name as possible, IF possible. It’s really hard to get something as long as http://www.computerbooksonline.com to fit on a business card!
Gotta Move On
So selling computer books was profitable for a lot of years, and I have learned a lot, had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and made a lot of friends. But now, computer book sales are in the ditch. They just aren’t selling like they used to. You can find so much of what you need to know online. Or maybe the fad has faded. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s there.
Still, I love computers, technology still fascinates me, and I still love running the site (I must thrive on stress!). Computers have become such a part of our lives, and will only be more so in the future. Ubiquitous, huh?
So on we go. I know not where. I guess I’ll just enjoy the journey.
(is the page full yet? yeah I think it is. alright, later then!)
