But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.
It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.
It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.
Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.
One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.
Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.
