Motherboard:

During its initial printing run, International Data Group printed just 7,500 copies of DOS for Dummies.

And:

By 1993, the series had sold 1.3 million copies on its own. Now there are 1,950 individual books in the series, covering a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with computing, and the books have sold upwards of 300 million titles.

And:

Recently, I bought a book—quaint, I know—and I’m probably the only person to have purchased this book or anything like it in more than 20 years.

It’s a reference book, the kind that you can still pick up at Barnes and Noble today. But it’s best described as what you’d get if you combined a phone book, a Matthew Lesko free money guide, and the internet.

That book is really the crux of the article. A fascinating look back at a time before Google, when the Internet was but a toddler.