Quoted from zarco:Got hooked on pinball in 1989 well before this newfangled internet madness. Machines were found via the classified in the local rag....Back in the early internet days there was a news group called 'rec.games.pinball' and that was very active as early as the Darpa net.
To be more precise, rec.games.pinball was launched on 20 November 1990 (I was involved), but it was justified by all the pinball traffic that had been in rec.games.video.arcade before that. Newsgroups could propagate over the Internet or UUCP connections. I'm presuming that Steve is sarcastically using the words "newfangled internet madness" to refer to the WorldWide Web. Newsgroups can now be read via WWW.
In the 1989-90 era, we had the national newsletter, Pinball Trader, as a way to see classified ads for pinball. In the New England area, there were printed weeklies that were nothing but classified ads. A thing called "The Want ADvertiser" coming out of a Boston suburb was the most likely to have (used) pinballs and other coin-op games. You had an advantage if you knew which newsstands got it earliest in the week.
As for new game releases, the times were actually less "dark" in the 1960s than in the 1970s and 1980s, because Billboard magazine carried ads for new games in their Coin Machines section. Billboard was available on the better newsstands, as it continues to be today, but they really tapered off the coin machine coverage around 1969-71, just in time to miss out on the original coin-op video games. Coming full circle, you can now find back issues of Billboard to view online, and they have often been OCR-scanned so that the text is searchable. No more dark times!
.................David Marston
