Ah I miss the old Byte Magazine (like people miss the NES or PS1 etc). The ads looks completely insane with 2022 glasses on - who'd buy a random 64 KB ram extension for an S-100 bus? What was the market for this? Couldn't have been large.
The S-100 bus was popular with an early generation of machines with 8080 or Z-80 processors that ran CP/M, though there were a few counter examples.
By the time I started reading Byte at the public library (1980) there were a few computers that were mass market like the TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodore PET, TI-99/4A, etc. Mass market computers were talked about a lot in the editorial in Byte but Byte was also full of ads for more exotic machines aimed at OEMs, for instance to build a cash register system for a supermarket. Cromemco, for instance, advertised harder than anybody, but it was rare to see Cromemco and other exotics talked about in the articles.
Can you imagine cutting off the bottom 1/4 of a magazine page, writing your name and address on the order form, putting that in an envelope with a check and then waiting 6-8 weeks for your new memory card to show up in the mail?
And this in an era where there was no such thing as package tracking. You got your stuff when you got your stuff.
I've ordered a few things mail order this year because they were not available any other way. The wait doesn't bother me. Order confirmation comes when the bank tells me the check has been cashed. But the lack of package tracking causes mild anxiety.
Most of it was art. Some from the artists. Some from auctions. When you get to a certain grade and price of certain items, online becomes a liability, not an asset. Too many scammers, I presume.
Also, some hand-made things. Custom paper and such.
