In my early years as an engineer, if I needed a company's catalog, I'd phone their sales department and ask for one, and if I gave them enough BS about the thousands of parts I was going to buy, I could sometimes get them to overnight it to me. That was best case. Now I download a PDF file of the catalog in about 38 seconds and I don't have to store a big paper one in my file cabinet.
Buying things by "mail order" was non-fun too. If you go back enough years, no one took credit cards, so I'd mail a check, and if I was lucky it wouldn't take a whole month for the items to arrive.
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