In the 1980s the number of people who had dial-up online services at home was tiny. It wasn't anything close to mainstream until the mid/late 1990s -- well after the start of Sears' financial difficulties.
Yes, in 1993, when Sears decided to close their catalog, much of the internet was still considered off-limits for commercial purposes [1]. We take today's use of the internet for shopping (and other commercial uses) for granted, but in 1993 it was not at all 100% clear that such a use would be allowed.
But home computer adoption was skyrocketing at the time. My argument here is that once people saw the utility of this then they'd buy modems, the same way they saw the utility of printing and bought printers for their computers.
At the time, a modem was the same price, if not cheaper, than a printer or a floppy disk drive. It wasn't exactly a luxury expense.
Ah, you're suggesting Sears could have run their own dial-up shopping service? Maybe, but I think it was too early. It would have been a text mode system (home computers, such as they were in the 1980s, were systems like Apple II or Comnmodore or TRS-80 or maybe CP/M or DOS if you had a "business" computer at home).
Macintosh computers were available, but expensive and not a typical home computer. And bandwidth on dial up at that time was maybe 2400 baud, way too slow to send any kind of detailed images of products that consumers would want in a catalog.
It might have gained some adoption, but in that era I think most consumers would have found filling out an order form and faxing or mailing it in easier.
I was active in the BBS scene during that time. What could be done over 1200-2400 baud was fairly impressive considering the technical limits. Especially when ANSI and RIP graphics became the norm. Later 4800 and 9600 modems became cheap. By the late 80s these were the norm.
Ordering systems would have been trivial to implement if the political and commercial will was there. Not too long after this you had Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL offering these kinds of services. I remember they let you order flowers, buy software, etc from their online systems.
The web and tcp/ip internet replacing it all didn't come until much, much later. From 1983-1995 online services were ruled by non-TCP/IP dial-up BBS services and proprietary services like Prodigy. Home internet didn't take off until 1995-1996 and even then it was fairly limited.
>Apple II or Comnmodore
On top of all the PC clones running DOS and Windows (Windows 1.0 was 1985), Amigas, Macs (as you mention), Timex/Sinclair, etc.
Macs were home computers, there were just less of them. Back in those days people paid large prices for home machines, so the pricetags might seem high today but the utility/novelty factors made up for it.
In the mid-eighties to mid-nineties home computers still cost several thousands of dollars. Installing a modem was no small feat either in computers from that time.
Some were cheap. The TI 99/4a was almost being given away in the mid-80s. But I don't ever remember it being popular for accessing dial-up. Its Terminal Emulator implemented a proprietary protocol and was actually more popular for its text-to-speech capability.
