Jolt Country

I have a few boxes of computer manuals. I've tried to separate them into two categories - ones that are legitimately interesting to read on their own (usually because they consist of well-written back / side-stories - Knight Orc, Circuit's Edge, Veil of Darkness) and ones that I'll keep till the day I die, just because.

I somehow got a hold of a "catalog" from a software retailer named Silicon Express, and I've kept their product listing ever since. It's not a catalog like a Sears catalog, but rather a large sheet of easily-folded paper with listings for titles on various platforms.

I suspect it's from around 1986. Alter Ego is listed, but King's Quest III isn't. Ultima IV is there, but not for the PC. It's got listings like this:
(It's unfortunate that the PC version wasn't something they carried. Possibly, it didn't exist yet, but I have doubts. Oo-Topos would seem to be discounted. Anyway, I would have snapped that thing up if it had been.)

I'm pretty sure I ordered Spy Hunter from them. They have it listed as 26.00 dollars even. I would later find out that it wouldn't work on the PCjr. At this point, I'm not sure what happened - I know for a fact that it wasn't a game that we kept, because I have almost all my old floppies. Also, 26.00 was a lot of money to me when I was 12. So I would have freaked out at having flushed that much of it. Again - just guessing here - I wonder if I returned it and got something else.

At any rate! I'm going to try to scan the entire thing. It's really not that big, and shows what prices were for video games at the time. It's also got loads of Infocom titles - they wanted $21.75 for Zork I (all platforms) and $24.75 for Zork III. Infocom getting prices that were right in line with everything else Silicon Express offered up to four years later was pretty savvy on their part.

I'm pretty sure that's one of the companies my parents used to order software from for their computer store (Yukon Software).

My parents opened Yukon Software in the summer of 1985 (7th grade, for me). My dad built three big wooden display shelves and printed out three signs that read IBM, APPLE and 64/128. They sold mostly software, followed by blank disks (which nobody in town sold at the time) and occasionally hardware.

By 1985 my dad owned multiple computer systems. In the middle of the store there was a small open area, so my dad put a table/desk in there and set up our PC Jr., our Franklin Ace 1000 (an Apple IIe clone), and our Commodore SX-64. Here is a picture of the room; unfortunately you can't see the Commodore, but you can see the other two.



Yeah, that's Little Computer People running on the Apple. And also, yeah, I still have that monitor.

So anyway, what they found out real quick was that they did not order enough software to get any kind of bulk discount, so instead they ended up ordering from magazines like the ones you mentioned. Their plan was to buy programs for $20 and sell them for $25 or $30. My dad told me one time that he made more money selling blank disks than anything else. Actually the biggest profits came from selling computer systems, but like I said, I think they only sold 2 or maybe 3 the whole time they were open.

The contract for the space was for a year and during the time they were open, Wal-Mart started carrying things like blank disks and games, which pretty much killed my parents' store. I think it was the game Alternate Reality, and I'm making up the details here, but their cost was something like $32 and MSRP was $35, and all of a sudden Wal-Mart was selling it for $27 ... so it was literally cheaper for my parents to buy stuff from Wal-Mart across the street and try to sell it that way, which of course is not a successful business model.

When I see that picture of the computer room in Yukon Software I am reminded how lucky I was to grow up smack dab in the middle of the home computer revolution and how cool (and brave) my parents were to take a risk like that. VIVA YUKON SOFTWARE!