90s CompUSA Ads: Maximum Computery Nostalgia 

And this is why the Sunday morning news papers were such a treat back then. Compusa, Best Buy, circuit city, American, a few video game stores. Sears, I can go on….

I sincerely appreciate your enthusiasm. I was the only kid around that got excited for these Sunday ads. Thank you for this!

As a kid I wanted one of those colorful Apple computers so bad. They may have been just colored plastic, but it made them so unique.

I remember going to CompUSA with my parents at least a few times back when I was little, and my mom explaining to me that this was basically my stepdad's version of Toys R Us. Very sad it was replaced by a nursing school but the time I was old enough to really be into computers.

This took me right back. I worked at CompUSA in 1998-2000 for all the transparent craziness.

OMG, every time I watch one of your videos I am instantly transported back to the 1990s where I first started with computers and laptops and first gen digital cameras (with floppy disks hahaha) and early PDAs and all that jazz... Thanks as always for the nostalgia trip. ❤

Love these type of videos. Its like therapy and so relaxing thinking about those times

I miss CompUSA, I used to shop there a lot there at a mall back in the late 90s and early 2000s! I remember being blown away by the then-new iMac! It’s like seeing a brand new invention, those digital cameras were so cool!

This is hands down one of my favorite videos you've done! LOVED this retrospective on the adverts from those years. I was such a newbie to the computer scene, and though my interests were more into console gaming and toy collecting, this brought back a lot of memories!

I worked at CompUSA from 1999 to 2007, those ads brought back so many memories. Still have my uniform and name tag. Another video you have done in a while and if you are in a bind is a LGR eats video.

Wow! Looking through the Sunday newspaper inserts is a crazy throwback. As a kid, I always looked forward going through all the toy and electronic store ads. This is definitely a series I would watch. Can't wait to see more!

My cousin and I played around with 3D Home Architect a lot back around that time. I don't know which version it was, but that box art looks very familiar!

I love seeing these old ads! I used to read them religiously around the same time period, also without the money to actually buy anything haha. Also used to just hang out at stores like CompUSA and others in the computer section and just look at stuff and mess around with the display models for hours… man memories…

I would definitely like a Starfield review from the LGR perspective.

LOVE these videos!! So much nostalgia within those papers.

I would always get SO excited for CompUSA fliers on Thanksgiving day. I would usually find nothing that was both "a thing I must have" and a substantial bargain, but the potential... oh, the potential... So exciting! Can't beat hanging with the family, full up on turkey and pie, and seeing ads for cakeboxes of store-brand CD-Rs at ridiculous prices.

Thanks for this one Clint. I had a smile on the whole time. What a wonderful time for computing!

I absolutely love these type of Retro Ad reviews.

I got my start in Computing back in 92 . The 90s were a exciting time for me and computers . I wish I had kept all my old machines . I still have my first computer that I built in 94 . 486 DX100 still runs perfectly ,just need a new case for it . I remember these CompUSA ads , Curcuit City , Frys Electronics ect.. Sad those stores are gone . I use to go to these places every pay day after I paid all my bills . Thanks for this one . I had a CompUSA branded computer back in the day . I love this old stuff ,a lot more fun than the modern stuff .

These are legitimately some of my favorite videos of yours. Love the nostalgia of looking through these old circulars.

that was the most nostalgic experience ive had in a long while. had me reminiscing of sunday afternoons at my grandmas, wish-listing with my cousin, eating lots of food with football on in the background. 12yo me wanted one of those windows ce palmtops so bad.. thanks for that and hope for more

Perfect content to get through the final hours of this workweek. 🎉

These ads and others from that time were always awesome. I miss them.

I still remember getting up early Sundays before church to snag the CompUSA sale ad and thoroughly review it. My brother and I got a lot of their "free or almost free" games after rebate. I bought my 2 Voodoo 2 12 Meg cards there.

The tech in these ads were my life at the time. I took home a flyer from Staples when working there from 1997-2002. So foolishly tossed them out, of course, not knowing how nostalgic they would be. 😢

Had the foresight to save some of these as a kid, still have them and enjoy looking through them every now and then! takes me back to those sunday mornings in the late 90s!

The crystal colors of 90's tech was the coolest thing growing up.

Man! Those early digital cameras are why film stuck around so long! I can't imagine trying to use digital back then. In 1999, I was 15, so I was definitely shooting on a 35mm SLR, probs a Minolta.

CompUSA was one of my go to computer stores back in the day. Thank you for this trip down nostalgia lane.

I started to laugh everytime you said "I have one of these" 😅. You have so many of these items in the catalog you probably forget about some of them

I'd love a Starfield review, I hear lots of mixed things but nothing so effectively and methodically analysed like you do best. Enjoy your trip, drive safe!

This was the best. I like that you instabuyed it immediately haha. Thanks and hope you had a great time on the trip.

I remember in 1999 when the first 15" LCD monitors were available for about $1K, as you showed in this video. At the time while I wasn't poor and I wasn't rich, I did have a good job and some savings and really really really really wanted one, so I ran off to my favorite local CompUSA, a store where for several years I had spent a good portion of my disposable income, since building and upgrading computers was my hobby, and I bought one of these 15" LCD monitors and I remember it being $900 or $999... A huge chuck of change for the day. I excitedly brought it home, used it for a couple of days, and I don't think it was buyer's remorse but I was just underwhelmed at what I was looking at for the price, so I boxed it back up and brought it back to the store to return. What should have been a simple return ended up becoming a flat-out interrogation by the service desk who tried everything to deny the return. In the end they were unsuccessful and I got my money back.

Keep in mind the prices from 1999 are lower then they would be today due to inflation. $100 in 1999 would be almost $200 today when adjusted for inflation, so just roughly double the prices in the ad to see what it would have felt like to buy those things back then

I love these kind of videos I watched someone flip through old Sears catalog from the 80s the other day

wow, turbo tax was $10? compared to the $100 ripoff it is now. love this video! wish there were more of these., not sure if anyone remembers, but back in the day CompUSA had crazy hot deals with their free after rebate stuff. i remember waiting in line outside a grand opening, and they were handing out tickets for those looking to get in on those items. they had scanner, webcam, mice, keyboards, surge protectors, air in a can, all free after rebate. i must have spent close to a thousand dollars and got every penny back.

I worked at CompUSA when these ads came out. We usually got them a week or two before they were released. I don’t get news papers anymore, but I do miss those flyers. When the original iMac came out Apple had a poor video on it that drove people away rather than sell the computer. I replaced it with the Star Wars Phantom Menace trailer on repeat and people would crowd around it.

These are really cool, especially from this era. Please do more!

Thanks for these lot of memories, it's so interresting to me to remember the old school PC computers. It was a huge period for me, and I miss it so much now I'm 37 years old.

I'm happy as long as i get to hear your smooth calming voice talk about tech and nerdy stuff.

This is so fun to look at as well as incredibly depressing. We lived in an amazing time.

Oh man, 1999, what a year. I had an AMD K6-300 at the time and had constant issues with it. I wanted to replace it with a new Intel Pentium III that was all the hype that year, but being just a poor kid that wasn't happening. Until I got the chance to work a summer job at my dad's office. They had just switched from Lotus SmartSuite to Microsoft Office and had a network drive with thousands of documents that needed to be converted from the old format to the new one. They expected me to sit there for 6 weeks opening files one by one in Lotus and saving them as MS Office type files. That got old real quick, so when I got home I looked online for a batch converter tool and what do you know, I found one. So I put it on a floppy disk, brought it into the office the next day, let it run for an hour or so... and I was done haha. Didn't dare to tell anyone I "cheated", so I just kept quiet and collected my paycheck every week while pretending to be busy. By the end of summer I was able to buy a Pentium III 550 MHz that ran games much better than the K6 ever could!

Always a nice trip down memory lane (and see some of the lesser known games that I bought back in the day too).

For the record, when I see you have a new video (and I have time) I click! If I don't have enough time, I wait and then click. I do love your stuff.

I'm from the Metro Detroit area and I can remember going to the John R Location a lot as a kid before it closed a friend of my aunt worked there for a long time. I can remember those flyers from the Detroit Free Press, brings back some good old memories. Thanks LGR

Please do more of these! I'll be at the show looking at all manuals! So excited .

A couple of months ago, my father found a 1992 catalog from a superstore when he was cleaning the basement. Some of the things advertised were denim jackets, Aladdin toys and a great raffle where the winner could win a prize of two million pesetas.

My Dad bought me a blue coloured iMac back in the day. I actually used it as a FirstClass BBS server, I loved this stuff 😊

Thanks for the travel back, I really enjoyed this!

I've enjoyed this two camera setup kind of video. I'd love to see more like this in the future

Man those Sunday morning ads in the newspaper were awesome. Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, Office Max, Target, Kmart, Toy R Us, etc. I spent hours dissecting each add of stuff I couldn't have.

If there is a year I'd love to come back in time to, it's gotta be 1999. At the turn of the century, everything was new, exciting, amazing. Video games were starting to turn mainstream and to seize the new advancements in technology. And computers were starting to truly discover their future potential.

I was laughing to myself when LGR was looking at the Detective Barbie game, I remember he played it with PushingUpRoses a few years ago, and Barbie constantly saying "Clint" still makes me smile 😄

The joy, every Sunday as a kid, of getting the newspaper and rifling through the ads was so much fun. The only thing my sister and I had to make sure of was to carefully take out the TV guide that came in the paper and place it on the couch next to the remote so my dad knew where it was. I remember one time when the tv guide (swear to God) just wasn't in the newspaper. By the time my dad woke up from his night shift sleep and knew, all the papers were sold out. He used to go through the guide and circle all the stuff he wanted to watch that week! Unfortunately, he had to go buy an actual TV Guide, like the famous one, but he just hated it because the format was so unfamiliar to him that he just ended up throwing it away after a day or two. I fished it out of the trash and every day I had to go through the guide and tell him what was one, circle it and remind him when stuff came on b/c he didn't want to look at the TV Guide 🤣

Obviously we never had CompUSA up here in Beaverland (AKA Canada) but I still enjoy the nostalgia of old flyers. I remember looking through Futureshop or RadioShack back in the day and being excited about new tech. Thanks for taking us in your time machine.

Hah, wow, those CompUSAs in Troy, Novi, and Madison Heights in Michigan were very frequent haunts for me back in the day! One by home, one by work, and another kind of on the way home from work. 😅

Your content makes me happy. Thank you

Insert videos are the best. Thank you

It’s always crazy seeing how expensive computers used to be. My dad worked at Compusa until they went out of business. Spent a lot of time in the video games after school in the early 2000s

I hope you understand how much love there is behind 11k people jumping at the chance to hang out with you for a half hour while you look through old newspaper ads :)

I had a K6 pentium 1 back in the day running windows 98 sp2. I had forgotten about those bios replacement cards. I had one for HDs bigger than 2gigs. What a time to be alive 😂😂 I love your work.

Its crazy how the ads and catalogs we received in the mail and newspapers that went directly to the trash without even looking at them are now collectors items. Not to the degree of an old comic book but still they have some monetary value! Not just computers but all kinds of merchandise! Just look at the ebay price of something like a Sears Wishbook catalog! My mom would bring each of us kids our own copy for Christmas shopping! After that we were done with them!

I started college in 2000 and shortly after that I "financed" (via my student loans) a K7 Barton laptop which iirc cost me CAD around $1800+tax. I got a lot of usage out of it during college but holy hell I remember the stress of buying it. Around 10 years later I remember picking up a pair of laptops for my nephews together for like $1200 or so. How prices changed....

In 2000 I started working on the weekends at my local newspaper plant, helping to make the Sunday paper. On break, in the middle of the night, I'd grab these and other Sunday inserts and ogle over the computers and electronics for sale. What a great time to be 16.

I worked at CompUSA from 99-03 and was a real fun experience. Loved getting these ads as well as I was a fan of the store itself before i got hired. I got a great discount for anything in the store so I would buy Dreamcast games for like 10-15 bucks a pop

With Best Buy being perhaps the only remaining mass market bricks & mortar vendor for computers and related hardware, it's hard to remember how much we dwelled over the Sunday newspaper supplement advertisements for CompUSA, Circuit City, and even the Gateway stores. They were the only game in town if you wanted to go and actually see or experience the stuff.

Yes. We need more " Lazy Games Reviews " on this channel, asap 😊

Man, I really miss that Grand Rapids store on 28th Street. My friend worked there, and he had some great stories about his tour of duty with CompUSA.

Man, I still have Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9 installed on my desktop. It's low-key been an incredibly useful and often fun software thorough the years. ...decades, at this point.

Man I used to LOVE looking through these. Now I can't even touch newspaper without having a touch aversion like sense.

What a time capsule! I started with a Palm Pilot Pro (1 meg!). All business folks on the train had the Palm Pilot or Casio Boss, "beaming" contact info to each other! WinCE was such a dog! It was abandoned, reborn as Windows Embedded, and flopped again. I remember all the "free after rebate" stuff that required the most outrageous paperwork: FIND the rebate coupon from the mess of a bulletin board, mail in the coupon, receipt and box-top and HOPE that it was honored a few months later.

Cool and fun little vid. Enjoy these sorts of things ever now and then.

The Madison Heights store was my home CompUSA for a while and I spent an obscene amount of money there, bought my Monorail there, Cassiopeia, tons of parts, a nice Toshiba Laptop, and tons of splurge items.

I'm seriously surprised how much I enjoyed watching this video.

I remember my middleschool had like 10-15 of them on the ground in one of the modular rooms they put the smaller elective classes in, I always wanted one of those IMac G3s just because of how cool they looked

Computer Shopper was the ultimate nerdery as well. Also loved the Macworld and PCworld catalogs. Those were the days.

It's amazing you found those in pristine condition

how are they so new and pristine looking?

I used to take a 12 hour bus from Mexico City to McAllen TX to buy from CompUSA around the same years. I bought everything for my computers there. They broke my heart one time they sold me a defective RAM chip that I got to test after I was back in Mexico City.

It's insane how many computer stores used to be in Madison Heights, MI.... Microcenter joined them in 2002, then Circuit City, CompUSA, RadioShack and others left...dang

Wow, I had no idea the G3 iMac came in purple! We had the orange when I was like 9 years old. My dad got it as a prize in some work raffle, that thing was the family computer for years haha.

Yay I love it when you do these types of videos 😊🙌

Great video Clint, always enjoyable to get a new LGR on Saturday morning with my breakfast. Great start to the weekend :)

This takes me back. I remember buying the boxed SimCity 3000 Unlimited when I built my first tower, an Athlon K7/500.

"Used to tack these on my walls" and the change of countries? Clint, you should do an AMA! Or just a q&a session. :)

Man seeing the ads for the hop pavilion. Damn, I remember I’d gotten in in either 99 or 00 for Christmas with windows Me on it. More I think I’d say it was Christmas 99 as I had it thru high school and within a year or so I’d upgraded to windows xp. A friends brother had a “copy” with a “valid” key to upgrade. And when cnc renegade came out I added a gforce gpu, the minimum it called for, into it and had upped the ram to the Mac allowable. Kept that beastly all thru my time in the usaf before it eventually died. Fast foreword a decadeish and I’m back into of gaming. Ahhh memories.

“Who am I kidding, I’m doing it anyways”. OMG! I laughed so hard on that one, Clint!!!

I’m not sure if it’s rose tinted glasses, but computers back then just seemed more exciting and felt like magic. It was a big deal when someone got a new computer.

I remember midtown Manhattan used to have a comp USA near Columbus circle. My friend and I used to go there to buy the gaming CDs for the Windows 98 computer. Good old days.

I remember I got Falcon 4.0 and it came with the huge manual. I loved it. Felt like a real flight school for a few moments.

I used to love Computer Shopper magazine the most. It had articles but nobody read it for the articles. You read it to drool over the pictures.

Hey, that Grand Rapids location was my local one back in the day. I remember getting a photo ID there and my dad taking me there for their going out of business sale. I think I also remember buying the Peanuts Holiday collection on VHS there.

Always enjoyed your video game videos as well, both contemporary and retro, so even though I don't play Starfield myself I'd love to see a video on it.

Those iMacs were big at my high school for the yearbook club. Used them so many times

I was 2 years in to my career job when Y2K work was hot. I did a crap ton of updates to computers for my company at the time. Got an award for my work as well which was nice. I always find it funny when people say "Yeah, but nothing happened!" Right, that was the goal of the Y2K work... for NOTHING to happen. Because if something did happen, people would have lost their minds.

First PC was an IBM Aptiva with a K6-2. We actually got it for free with a monitor/kb/mouse by signing up to a dialup ISP called PeoplePC. I honestly still wish I had that machine. It was pretty crap but it was a solid upgrade to the Dreamcast I was using to chat on IRC with. Some of the best years of my teenage life honestly. Thanks for the nostalgia!

Love the face cam for these types of videos!

I have a Creative Nomad MP3 player (it looked basically liked a CD player). It worked awesome, I used it for years. How the times have changed.

I consider these vintage catalog videos "substantial." Really wish I saved all those Radio Shack and Best Buy newspaper ads. So much nostalgia.

My god the feeling looking at these….. this… the feels man. The feels.