At a recent Labs meetup, the conversation wandered into 1980s mail-order catalogs, and I lit right up.

If you were a nerdy kid back then, you know what I’m talking about. The DAK catalog was the best of the bunch. When one landed in the mailbox, my afternoon was gone.

It wasn’t just gadgets and prices. Every product got a full write-up, paragraphs of it, explaining what the thing did and why my life was incomplete without it. I read those pages like short stories. I had no money to buy any of it, but I could tell you the specs on every cordless phone, shortwave radio, and stereo receiver they sold.

I recently found a scan of the 1987 Early Winter DAK catalog on the Internet Archive, and it holds up. Flipping through it brought the whole feeling right back.

And it turns out DAK still exists. I figured it had folded decades ago along with most of the catalog business, but no. Still going.

This is probably one of those you-had-to-be-there things. But if you grew up waiting on the mail for one of these to arrive, go spend a few minutes with that 1987 scan. It was a glorious day when one of them showed up.