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Popular Electronics archives

americanradiohistory.com

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This site is one nasty lawyer's letter away from being lost forever. It's the unpaid[1] labor of love of a single person[2], far more than Popular Electronics[3], but appears to be unauthorized.

Whoever currently holds the rights to these journals should have no financial reason to order the material taken down, but they can still do so "just because". This huge historical resource depends on the whims of old copyright holders and their lawyers.

Someone else here has pointed out that the Popular Electronics scans are also on the Internet Archive. I wonder how they deal with it; the issue must come up often for them.

[1] "There are no ads or things for sale on the site. I've been in radio for better than 50 years. This site is a way of giving back." From the FAQ: http://www.americanradiohistory.com/American-Radio-History-F...

[2] "Just one person does most of the work." From the FAQ.

[3] http://www.americanradiohistory.com/index.htm#TECHNICAL

Nearly everything that is able to be traced to an interested owner has consent. Where no rights holder can be found, we place a "take down" notice on the site that says we will remove offending material. The only time that has happened was with a limited circulation DX publication. We have an attorney who prepares out letters of consent and guidance. Many early radio publications are out of copyright, and many later ones are totally abandoned. Occasionally the owner of a live copyright will right and ask, "why are you not preserving the publication... I have some in the garage you can have."

Ah, the dangers of unbridled spell checkers. Of course, that is "write" and not "right".

The highlight point of how to keep things from being "lost forever" is the download button. As long as a hundred or a thousand people download these PDFs and keep them, the preservation retains. Someday they'll even potentially be public domain.

That is glorius, consider this advertisement from Feb 1982

Reddy Chirra improves his vision with an Apple. Reddy is an optical engineer who's used to working for big companies and using big mainframes. But when he started his own consulting business, he soon learned how costly mainframe time can be. So he bought himself a 48K Apple II Personal Computer. And, like thousands of other engineers and scientists, quickly learned the pleasures of cutting downon shared time and having his own tamper -proof data base. His Apple can handle formulas with up to 80 variables and test parameters on 250 different optical glasses. He can even use BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal and Assembly languages. And Apple's HI-RES graphics come in handy for design. Reddy looked at other microcomputers, but chose Apple for its in -depth documentation, reliability and expandability. Youcan get up to 64K RAM in an Apple II. Up to 128K RAM in our new Apple III. And there's a whole family of compatible peripherals, including an IEEE -488 bus for laboratory instrument control.

Visit your authorized Apple dealer to find out how far an Apple can go with scientific/ technical applications. It'll change the way you see things. The personal computer.

Remember that this was competing with the original IBM PC (1981) so something of a pitch. With a machine which was somewhat less powerful computationally to an Arduino but with more RAM and a lot less ROM (or FLASH in the ATMega case).

This might be an odd place for this question but I've recently gotten a retro compute bug for ancient engineering software. If anybody has good links or references to those, drop me a line!

None, but I do remember loading Autocad from four 5 1/4" floppies. Back when it supported dual displays; monochrome for text entry and some other color display; may have been EGA or some proprietary IBM display. Had to have an 8087 coprocessor, pen plotter, and large digitizer. All seems so boring now.

6502.org for starters

Thanks so much for posting! Doing a bit of research in post-war research and technology and source material such as this is the ultimate!

I personally love the adverts from the 1940-50s that beckon entrepreneurial spirits to enroll in a radio or tv technician correspondence course. The copy is so similar in tone to modern day "Learn iOS" adverts from Flatiron School and the like: seize your destiny, build the future, get paid to do what you love, while changing the world.

Made me tear up a bit. When I was ten, Popular Electronics was the first magazine to which I subscribed. I remember how excited I was when the May '65 issue was waiting for me when I got home from school.

My memories of Popular Electronics is around seeing the diagrams for a simple microcomputer, the Cosmac Elf which was based on RCA's 1802 CPU. I begged my mother for an advance on my pocket money, sourced the parts and wire-wrapped it all together over a Christmas break. Best money she ever spent, software and computers turned into my career and still is today.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I credit my mother allowing me a Popular Electronics subscription when I was 10 or so (up until they discontinued it) with jumpstarting my life in electronics and engineering. I can't wait to click through the covers to see how many of them immediately bring me back to a different time and place.

Some kids had comic books, I had Popular Electronics.

Same here. A subscription wasn't affordable to me, though I was totally enthralled when I would find a collection in the back of 7th grade science class, or in 1974 stumbling upon a current issue in a tiny, backwoods, northern town that didn't even have a traffic light. I still have and treasure them.

The "famous" January 1975 issue featuring the Altair 8800 that Paul Allen showed Bill Gates before writing BASIC for the machine. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1...

This brings back a whole raft of pleasant memories. I devoured issues of Popular Electronics while in high school in the early 70s. It was one of the reasons I decided to be an EE. I randomly clicked a couple issues from 1969 to 1973 and was amazed to actually remember a number of the articles, 45+ years after first reading them. I'm looking forward to a more in-depth review.

Halcyon days; those articles did stick in your head, the covers, as well as the schematics, I think, because unlike today technical information was often difficult to come by as a hobbyist/non-professional/kid; you would often read and re-read every article, teasing out every detail.

The very first Carl and Jerry.[1]

[1] http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/50s/5...

Also available through IA https://archive.org/search.php?query=popular%20electronics

As well as the entire run of Wayne Green's 73 Magazine, for amateur radio enthusiasts: https://archive.org/details/73-magazine

A particular perk for me here, is that I am a bit of a packrat, and if I have books or magazines I will keep them, even if they get to be hilariously old. The exception to this is if I can find them in a digital form that won't run me broke. I can trade a pile of paper magazines now for a small cache of PDF files. :D

Agreed. I have moved those boxes of PE, Radio Electronics, Elementary Electronics, Byte (and Amiga/Atari mags) so many times over the past forty years - I'd really, really like to stop now :-)

I still nave the May '90 edition in print; the month I graduated high school then went on to EE. Keep it just for nostalgia, to see how things have changed. That issue had plans to build a digital dashboard for your car.

Do the "popular" magazines still have the ads in the back with the pirate gal advertising cable TV test boxes?

Wow, this reminded me of how much detail on technical specs about stereo equipment I used to carry around in my head. Cartridges for record players was a whole separate section of my brain. I think I spent $300 on one once - in 1979 dollars, too.

Really liked the article in the first issue exploring the solar powered battery. Very cool to see something on solar power when it was just the start of a cool idea and knowing where it is today (seemingly also just the start).

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