The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close | Hacker News Reader

The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close

bytecellar.com

336 pointsecliptik161 comments

Heavy nostalgia for me thinking of computer magazines. We were fairly poor, but I could afford Byte magazine. Late 70’s and early 80s I absorbed computing like a sponge from about age 10, with my only time using actual computers in stores like K-Mart. When I saw the ZX-80 kit in Popular Electronics I started my begging to dad. Then the ZX-81 came out along with its sister the Timex-Sinclair 1000, and it was finally cheap enough for my dad to manage it.

I didn’t care about the membrane keyboard. Or the tape cassette inputs. Or the crashing from the 16k ram pack. It was a computer, and it was mine. And I started applying all that Byte knowledge.

I barely attended college, and didn’t need to. Byte, and its lesser sisters was a far better education for me.

This is incredible. Thanks for sharing!

I have a similar nostalgia for the days I waited for Byte magazine to be translated into its Arabic version in Jordan and distributed in other countries in the region. Those translators would be sought after and get high salaries-$10k per month for other computer magazines-PC and Winmag magazines,in the late 90s, those would be photocopied and distributed in Yemen, Libya and other countries in the region. I subscribed to an e-newsletter from Winmag Karen Kenworthy, who wrote for Windows Magazine and Winmag.com for almost a decade. One Winmag author-Mike Elgan- is still active until now.

Heavy nostalgia for me too. I grew up in a small town that didn't even have a library back at the time. The monthly magazine was my only source of information and I still keep every single issue in my attic - that's how precious they were to my.

I remember Byte magazine too. When I discovered it and was able to subscribe, every issue was full of exciting new ideas, amazing incredible list of endless companies selling pc stuff. My grandfather signed up for it, and then I later got my own subscription. I was in high school, and I loved the tech world. I don't know why I didn't try to get a job in some computer repair shop. I was lucky enough to have an atari 400, the casette drive, the chiclet keyboard. I learned basic, then I hand assembled 6502 assembly to do stuff. I had that great book, De Rei Atari, and I did some crazy stuff like a little assembly on the vertical blank interval to do some wacky visual effect.

This was a foundational time for and probably millions of future engineers. I wish I could go back to that time ;-)

I got an Atari XE when I was a kid. In addition to Byte for news, I always had to pick up a copy of Antic, an Atari specific magazine with listings (mnany simple games) in each issue to type in. Mostly in BASIC and some assembly.

In 5th grade, around 1980, I would skip school lunchtime and spend it in the school library instead. The library had all the computer magazines, and Byte was my favorite. I would rather read these computer magazines than eat. I saved my lunch money every day and saved up enough plus some birthday money to buy an Atari 400 and a small black and white TV. I was in heaven. I eat pretty well now, and no doubt those early magazines and my first computer led directly to my prosperity all these years later.

In 5th grade, around 1998, a friend and I spent a few lunchtimes in the library decoding the Ultima Online rune alphabet from known town names on the paper map. In retrospect we probably could have just looked it up online but I think we hadn't yet developed the search-everything mindset.

I hadn't thought of this in a long time before your comment reminded me.

>a friend and I spent a few lunchtimes in the library decoding the Ultima Online rune alphabet from known town names on the paper map. In retrospect we probably could have just looked it up online but I think we hadn't yet developed the search-everything mindset

It's very sad to realise that that feeling is never going to come back.

In India we had (still are? I don’t know) Chip, Digit, Linux For You and similar computer magazines. I learned so much from them, they showcased a whole variety of things, hardware parts reviews, interesting PC builds, nifty tricks and so on.

But what I looked forward to most was the included CDs. They would contain so many software, trial wares, free wares, game packs, screensavers, Winamp skins. It was like being a kid in a candy store.

Hey, I had a very similar experience. Growing up in Bombay in the late 90s, chip and digit were literally my introduction to computing. Though I was not that much into gaming, they made me a fan of computer architecture, of graphics cards and so on. I guess being a nerd hanging around lamington road, almost harassing the shopkeepers for deeper tech specs of every component was more education than any university could ever provide.

Then came Linux for you, and made me try my first Linux distro - xandros 2003. Then there was the complete 3 DVD Debian distro on LFY made me create an openmpi HPC in college among so many other things completely ignored by the formal education system.

I think there is a real value to limited, quality information like these magazines that the internet ruined. Devs these days have unlimited information at their fingertips - the internet and now chatgpt. But now the onus is on us - are we asking the right questions?

This stirred memories for me. My introduction to Indian computing magazines came later and my first Linux distro was a version of SuSe in 2007. I also fondly remember the free Linux CDs and DVDs that were around at the time. The magazines were one source, Ubuntu was another. The free Linux CD project was yet another.

You raise a good question about drowning in the flood of info on the internet. The lack of gatekeepers has upsides as well as downsides. One of those downsides is the lack of quality control. The Linux and computing magazines in India were very high quality and they got a lot of people interested in computing.

I remember Computers@Home. Convinced my parents to buy me my first PC after reading that magazine. The included CDs were a delight. Internet was so slow that I only ever played game demos from the CD. Haven't thought about that magazine for years!

Reminds me of: https://cabel.com/2023/11/06/dak-and-the-golden-age-of-gadge...

+10,000 for Popular Electronics reference

"Used over and over till they were tired and torn. Like a broken clock that can't tell time. Like a thick ass book that's filled with wack rhymes."

https://youtu.be/eH8RhX2Veog

My journey is very similar

Back in the day we had to rely on magazines for information, the books in the library were too old to cover the new stuff. Then it was BBS dialup filesharing boards, then the internet became a thing.

My first exposure to programming in the early 80s was copying in a BASIC game from some magazine. I read Byte Magazine for Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and dreamed of buying an IBM compatible. Dr Dobbs Journal was just an incredible eye opener into the world of serious compute science / engineering , particularly Mike Abrashs column on 3D - it was a black art - and a series on implementing unix.

It was great to see Linux Format and game mags in the early 00s, but I guess all good things evolve. Back then we would have wanted infinite information at our fingertips, one device to be a camera, mp3 player and phone all-in-one .. and flat screens that you could lift with one hand, so Im not complaining.

I do worry that young people just see the magic, and dont learn how things actually work under the hood .. I think Scratch and Minecraft are wonderful in this regard because you get to construct things yourself.

If we humans can build all these amazing things .. theres a chance we'll get our collective shit together and address climate change.

I love this post.

It’s okay to have nostalgia for those times and still appreciate what we have now.

It’s a great point how we would have swapped that for this at that point of time.

It has been an awesome and humbling experience to witness the last 40 years of computing. I wrote my first programs in Fortran on punched cards. Trying to live a healthy lifestyle so that I can witness the next 40 years.

My first computer program was taking an entire "choose your own adventure" type book and implementing it in Basic on my Commodore Vic-20. Took up all but about eleven bytes of RAM that I could cram into the thing, including the 16KB RAM module plugged into the back. That was the summer of 1982, two years before I graduated high school.

I didn't start writing COBOL and FORTRAN programs on punched cards for the IBM 3081 mainframe until I got into college, in the fall of 1984.

Most of what I learned about computing in those early days came from Byte Magazine.

I still want to know when we are going to get our Transputers that can run machine language code from any architecture of CPU, because even their microcode can be rewritten in software on the fly -- beyond what we can do with FPGAs.

My friend's father had a Vic-20. I remember watching him type in basic programs from magazines. Then backing up on a casette.

After buying several issues of MaximumPC and many conversations with people at work who could explain to me some of the questions I had, I finally used info from two separate issues to make a parts list. I drove to the nearest Fry's Electronic, Plano, Texas, and build my first PC. What a thrill! I marveled that I could build something that was so cutting-edge.

Humans are great and making things. Making collective decisions that might make everyone’s lives suck more in the short term and possibly not make much difference in the long term isn’t interesting to a lot of people. The only real way to reduce carbon emissions is via innovation. If you care about climate change stop protesting and start innovating.

Climate change is an unpriced economic externality. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.

If you want innovation, then create a market incentive for it. But that requires pushing bills that would wreck the prospects of oil companies, and cause trillions of stranded assets, so they lobby against it.

> But that requires pushing bills that would wreck the prospects of oil companies, and cause trillions of stranded assets, so they lobby against it.

The general public seems pretty opposed to higher fossil fuel prices.

Since there are no alternatives for the most part, this just becomes a lossy income redistribution program (with lots of opportunity for corruption). Also, as governments can simply decree who has to pay it and who is exempt it has the net effect of centralizing government power. If you want empirical evidence, just see what is happening in Canada.

> If you care about climate change stop protesting and start innovating.

The reason for climate change isn't a lack of technical innovation. We have ALL the innovations to change things. The reason for climate change is short-sighted greed, and a lack of political will, not a lack of scientific or technological capability.

The best thing we can do besides innovation is probably to put a brake on overconsumption by killing modern advertising practices.

Right here, officer, this is the terrorist that threatened eternally growing GDP!

Advertising is cancer.

Eternally growing GDP allows for employment, which gives way to a life worth living. That’s pretty popular.

Yeah too bad it actually can't grow eternally right??

A lack of will by the body politic or the lack of authority to compel behaviours of the electorate against its will?

Almost any law we take for granted goes against the will of at least some part of the electorate.

There are more than enough maniacs who would love nothing better than being allowed to put the pedal to the metal whenever they feel like it, and who don't give a damn about other peoples safety and lives be damned.

There are also people who would like to live in a society where they are allowed to hit (or do worse things to) anyone that annoys them for whatever reason.

There are people who think slavery is a great idea, or who think women should be subservient to men.

Computer magazines are gone in the whole world, not just US.

It's a bit sad, I've enjoyed them. The articles were well written when compared to average online articles about hardware.

But there's little point today in reading the news a few days or weeks after they happen.

Most people are into instant gratification, they want to hear the news, they aren't interested in the overall experience of reading an article, they don't care about author's point, they don't care about learning new things.

People just want to know in an instant how shinier is the latest iPhone when compared to the old one, how much does it cost and when they can get it. And a random online news outlet or random YouTube channel is enough for that.

We are not just experiencing the demise of PC magazines, but also the demise of printed press and of major old news outlets.

A guy with an YouTube channel or TikTok can have a greater audience than a former newspaper or magazine.

I quite like the register as it typically has clever writing

The problem is more that printed magazines are not searchable, and having a giant pile of paper in boxes in the attic, stuffed somewhere behind that awful vase and that camping equipment I haven't touched since the late 1990s, simply doesn't compare to typing a few keywords prefixed with `insite:DOMAIN` into a search bar, and getting really close to what I am looking for in an instant, and being able to bookmark thousands of articles (also searchable) in silica.

Not really. Heise’s “ct” seems to be still going as strong as ever. heise.de - it’s Europe’s largest computer magazine.

https://shop.heise.de/magazine/ct-magazin/

I see that the iX magazines are also from Heise. Have seen these before in supermarkets in Germany and it seemed like those magazines have interesting and technical articles. Sadly seems to be available in German only.

> We are not just experiencing the demise of PC magazines, but also the demise of printed press and of major old news outlets.

I have the impression that nowadays most people no longer want to invest the time to read in-depth articles or books on a topic. Myself, I recently read a couple of technical books and came to the conclusion that a good technical book is still worth it. It explores a topic in a structured way and in-depth, and the information in a technical book is supposed to have been reviewed. If you read good technical blogs, you can pick up a couple of things here and there, but I think it will never be as efficient as reading a good technical book on a specific topic.

Which books did you find worth it lately?

I am a .NET developer. I recently read "Concurrency in C# cookbook, 2nd ed" and found that one very interesting and clear. I mainly wanted a decent explanation on async-await, and the book has that. But aside from async-await, the book also explains other mechanisms for concurrency in modern .NET.

I am also reading Pro ASP.NET Core 7. I am not new to ASP.NET Core, but was surprised to learn some new things from the book.

I agree. People wanting to learn C# are told to watch YouTube entertainer videos and read the Microsoft docs haha.

C# In a Nutshell still is worth it's weight IMHO.

That one is on my to-read list. Only hear good things about that book. And I see that C# 12 in a nutshell is just released.

Definitely recommend it. The difference in detail and insight on the HttpClient information between the book and the Microsoft docs is a good case study.

The docs are often limited to autogenerated API with some surface level remarks.

> But there's little point today in reading the news a few days or weeks after they happen.

I have to total opposite view. I only want to read the news like after at least a couple of days, so that there is time for things to become clear. The CNN kind of "breaking news" looping the whole day in "latest developments" is stupid since there is usually nothing to talk about but rumors and "experts" guessing or pushing some murky agenda.

True story: I was born in Saudi Arabia and the internet hadn't arrived. But I was deep into building games. I wanted to load .bmps in my game but I couldn't figure out the format. My dad had PC Mag from Ziff Davis press which had a small table explaining how the BMP format has first 2 bytes as 'BM' then 4 reserved bytes, followed by 2 byte width and 2 byte height, then 1024 bytes for palette and the image array... I had to figure out how to decode everything but man, the 7th grader was so happy when an image I made was plotted on the TC DOS screen in VGA!

I'm glad that era is gone. It took too long to learn. When I went to my cousins in Pakistan who had internet, he showed me Yahoo (google wasn't a thing yet) and the very first thing I searched for was File Formats, and there was an entire website that shows the format of every file with full details. I almost cried on how easy it was vs. how much hard I had to work.

When I was a kid in the 80s I wanted to write 3D games. The only way to find any information was going to libraries. I used to get my parents to drive me to all sorts of different towns just so I could rummage through their libraries hoping to find a computer book I could use!

Then the Internet arrived for me in 1993 and suddenly everything I needed was right there. I feel you!

I feel like the mainstream print magazine era died when Playboy ended:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy#Online-only

There are lots of great niche magazines out there still printing if you have the money. I run a magazine encyclopedia so I see a lot of things coming across my screen and I'm actually floored by the number of magazines still printing.

Can you share a link?

Seconded. That encyclopedia would be quite interesting to see.

I'd like to know as well

https://en.magazedia.wiki/

(OP posted it in a different comment.)

Playboy is fundamentally different because of the buyer's shame that doesn't exist on the internet where buyers feel more comfortable making a naughty purchase.

(Of course in reality, more people are watching you on the internet.)

Shoutout to Trade Journal Cooperative, which curates and delivers a trade journal to their subscribers every quarter. I stopped reading the journals as closely, but I still read the cover letter every quarter, since 2020.

https://www.tradejournalcooperative.com/

Sounds like it could be neat or a total miss. I'm curious what some of the past journals have been?

I don’t remember the exact journals, but I remember these trades being covered:

Semiconductors

Tractor-trailer maintenance

Wedding venues

Private investigators

catalogued the issues in my collection elsethread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778825

This comment is oddly reminiscent of the other "shout-out" to the journal:

"This is a great chance to give a shout-out to the Trade Journal Cooperative https://www.tradejournalcooperative com/ -- not web sites, but it actually delivers paper magazines from interesting industry verticals. Everything from bowling alleys to semiconductors. Also, the covering letter from the editor is wryly observed and usually witty." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096833

Are you affiliated?

No. I am a subscriber to the Coop, and I am not ewilderj. There’s not much else to say about it. It’s like $15, and you get a stamped manila envelope filled with a cover letter explaining the choice of the quarter and a magazine.

I'm curious what some of the trade journals have been. What was the latest journal?

All journals were postmarked after the season they are labeled with. e.g. “Fall 2023” was signed by Tim on December 2, 2023, “December 2023” was from March 6, 2023.

————

Fall 2023 - Plastics Business

Summer 2023 - randomly, either Trenchless Technology or Compact Equipment

Spring 2023 - ?

Winter 2023 - BUSRide and BUSRide Maintenance (double-header)

Fall 2022 - Semiconductor Digest

Summer 2022 - Church Executive

Spring 2022 - Bowlers Journal International

Winter 2022 - VenuesNow

Fall 2021 - FleetOwner

Summer 2021 - National Fitness Trade Journal

Spring 2021 - Trains

Winter 2021 - Quality Assurance and Food Safety

Fall 2020 - Ratchet and Wrench

Summer 2020 - Genii

Spring 2020 - PI Magazine

Thank you

A computer catalog at the local Radio Shack set me off in 1978 or '79.

I started by reading BYTE Magazine cover to cover, in 1980, when I found it at the local library. It was a foreign language that I acquired, slowly, by immersion. I was twelve years old.

I was a BYTE subscriber in 1999, when they abruptly ceased publication. The new owners switched my subscription to "PC Magazine", I believe. I sent them a note to the effect that BYTE had covered the whole industry, not just Windows-compatible machines, and they could donate the pro-rated price on the subscription remaining to the beer fund for the BYTE staff that had had no warning that the ace was about to fall.

It's hard to build a culture, a cadre of writers and editors, with ad-hoc contributors to online sites. I subscribed to Ars Technica, Phoronix, and lwn.net with the lunch money I had left over as the year draws to a close. Please consider supporting such institutions, if you can. Every bit helps.

https://arstechnica.com

https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

https://lwn.net/subscribe/

https://archive.org/donate

I used to look forward to buying my monthly copy of Computer Shopper, if only to fantasize about upgrading the various components of my modest PC. More RAM, faster RAM, faster CPU, bigger HDD, more powerful GPU, bigger monitor, better monitor.

You're going to love this. https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper

Long before I could afford a computer of my own, I bought computer magazines… probably a few hundred after it was all said and done.

Before the internet, before BBSes and before floppy disks, magazines were the way programs were distributed in the late 70s and early 80s. You would type in the BASIC source code printed in magazines to give yourself something new to run.

Just browsing the archive.org's collection brought back so many memories… like this one when the Steve Jobs launched NeXT [1].

[1]: https://archive.org/embed/NeXTWORLDVol.1No.1JanuaryFebruary1...

There's a nice archive of many of the popular computer magazines - including PC World, MacWorld, MacUser, Byte - available here: https://vintageapple.org

Over the past few years, as magazines have gone from print to online-only, I've subscribed to some of them via Zinio ( https://www.zinio.com ). They carry PCWorld, Maximum PC, Macworld, MacLife, and more. Their "reader" is nice, but I do wish it supported downloading the magazines as PDFs.

One magazine that is available in print and online is MagPi magazine ( https://magpi.raspberrypi.com ). Its emphasis is on Raspberry Pi. You can download back issues for free, and the print version is often available at bookstores such as B&N.

Perhaps someone can train a generative AI on the old issues, and use it to create new issues based on YouTube tech channels and online forums.

Bookmarked

I remember being 13 and buying these magazines. In depth reviews and explanations of technologies.

Stuff like Byte was both deep, entertaining, well written and forward looking.

Internet media never got to the same heights as printed media did when it comes to editing and packaging quality.

That's not to say there haven't been great heights on the net too, as it allowed for new ways to communicate about technology (think https://ciechanow.ski/ great content and many more).

It felt like forever from when I first saw a laptop in a magazine ad and wanting it, to eventually getting it Christmas 2005. But it was probably only like four years.

PC gamer with a demo CD glued to the front was the best. RIP.

And floppies before that. I remember getting the Transport Tycoon demo that way.

Ah, the era of scrounging free floppies from AOL disks.

And cassettes before that. (I worked for the magazine that started the whole “cover-mounted games” trend, Amstrad Action.)

The other day I was wondering whatever happened to coconut monkey

Ctrl-F, “coconut”… was not disappointed. PC Gamer was an astounding resource in my childhood.

Still few here in UK, like PC Pro. Remember it all well like computer fairs and small little retail outlets selling ram, motherboards, GPUs. This is before PCWorld, Currys started selling completed packaged PCs. Fond memories

Yes, long may PC Pro continue! I currently sub to the print versions of that and Edge (gaming coverage).

I don't really care if I already knew the news as covered, it's much more I like to read their opinions on said news, I love the random stories from the "Real World Computing" section, and their reviews are a decent starting point when I'm considering something or asked to recommend, also giving an insight in to all sorts of areas I may otherwise not pay any attention to.

edit: Also, I worked computer fairs every weekend back in the day, all over the North - Cheshire, Aintree, North Wales, Bradford/Leeds. Those were great times!

For me, the end of the computer magazine was the end of print Dr Dobbs. For years, it was a wonderful staple that was just there. The world's a sadder place for its loss. :(

One great thing about software from magazines instead of GitHub is that you had to type it in and fix the mistakes. And those fixes taught you bit by bit what the code that you had typed in was actually doing. I learned more from the crashes than from the code!

The era of magazines in general has pretty much drawn to a close.

Print I assume you mean

What ARE sales of digital magazines like these days? On the rare occasions that I've had a passing thought to subscribe to one, I found that it's easy to subscribe but hard to unsubscribe, and so I never pulled the trigger.

Then my public library started offering PressReader access for free (well, local property taxes notwithstanding). So, much like Spotify, I basically have a subscription to every magazine on Earth now.

Interestingly, while I used to read stacks and stacks of print magazines back in the day, I very rarely think to even pull up PressReader. When I do, I just skim here and there for a few minutes before closing the app and doing something else.

Digital magazines just don't FEEL like magazines, in the way that actual print magazines used to. They feel like blogs, from the pre-social media era when the Internet was still mostly long-form writing. I don't know if this really says something about the decline of magazines, or my own personal cognitive or attention-span decline after ~15 years of social media consumption.

I read or listen to The Economist and The Atlantic cover to cover. I wouldn't if they didn't have audio editions. Social media and HN vie for my attention - I try to ignore.

And even digital magazines are somehow feeling the effects: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23978042/popular-science...

At the time this news came out, I thought PopSci was just no longer publishing on paper, but turns out even the digital magazine model isn't exciting enough to sustain itself sometimes.

This may be geo dependent. On a recent field trip to the UK I was surprised to see that WH Smith had the same wall of magazines as when I was a kid.

There’s a lot fewer than at their peak in the 90s/00s and they sell less. But they’re still going. (Former UK magazine editor, still write for them sometimes.)

I hope not. I still subscribe to several print magazines, and the quality of the content is leaps and bounds better than any of the junk available to read online.

Not as much as you’d think. Businesses like Monocle do pretty well in print, as do a lot of fashion / lifestyle sort of brands.

https://www.monocle.com

If you ever visit London, I highly recommend the MagCulture store. They also have a nice podcast: https://magculture.com/blogs/podcast

It’s definitely not the “default” like it used to be, though.

The reading experience on print is infinitely better, just because it’s not tied to an electronic device. It’s too easy to be distracted on a phone or even an e-reader.

Every magazine, no matter how good the quality, has annoyances on their sites - cookie notices, newsletter sign ups, having to even log in, ads even for subscribers.

For the two magazines I like to read in print (NYRB, LRB), even the ads are useful (mostly new books).

The selection of magazines today at Barnes & Noble is much better than it was at Waldenbooks when I was growing up in the 1980's.

I've got some Creative Computing and Byte stashed away (they're pretty shabby: these were not designed to get this old, even just put away somewhere. The paper deteriorates)

I've got the Byte cover with the computer watch, into which is being inserted a tiny floppy disk. I do NOT have an Apple watch, but that's what I think of when the Apple watch crosses my mind, is that Byte magazine cover.

We got there technically. Now, to rediscover the spirit of those days, when we imagined the future, shared, and found inspiration.

Those two were my favorite mags during the heydays of computing. To them I'd also add the first decafe of Wired. No other mag captured the computer revolution and the infinity of possibile worlds that might ensue better.

I bought some electronic hobbyist magazines few years ago (like Nuts & Volts) out of curiosity and because I always wanted subscription as a kid, but we never had it.

It was utterly underwhelming. The writing was ok, but each issue was maybe an an equivalent of 1-2 days worth of hackaday.com articles and nowhere as detailed as personal blogs (think "sprites mods"). This means that most issues will have at most one interesting article, or maybe none.

I would love to support the physical media, but it is simply not interesting enough.

Check Circuit Cellar (https://cc-webshop.com/collections/archives-circuit-cellar-i...)

That's unfortunate, as hackaday feels like that too me versus it's older writing style. I was hoping to see more advanced projects and I found it in this channel. https://youtu.be/Ma9FrN5COIo

We had a local "computer magazine" that was free (the local computer shops paid to advertise in it) and the best thing about it was the absolute _variety_ of the content. From detailed "here's how to rebuild civilization with a soldering iron and an 8088" to "tuning graphics on your SGI" and so on, it gave a great cross-section of the industry.

I remember in New Zealand there was a internet magazine from Australia which used to list a bunch of sites and a small description in different sections of the magazines (1997?)

It started off clean, then a couple of months later it had a small 'adult' section, and then each month after that the 'adult' section got bigger and bigger that the magazine got reclassified as a adult mag. (I never brought this mag)

I've never read byte in dead tree format but read it online at archive.org and am really grateful to the person(s) who have scanned it and uploaded it. The quality of articles are amazing and it's understandable how the early era of home microcomputers grew like wildfire, or was it all the low hanging fruit that Brian Kernighan talks about.

My biggest regret was buying Amiga Power (games) magazine as a kid in the early 90s instead of Amiga Format/CU Amiga, as the latter had assembler, AmigaE and music tracker tutorials.

Also there is some US website by a Ham Radio guy which also has a bunch of scans on it of early US publications which are great to read

Until recently an apple II magazine called Juiced.GS was still in print. I can't actually tell if it still is since their website is broken.

It's still in print: https://juiced.gs/2023/07/juiced-gs-2024/

I still subscribe to Juiced. It’s a great magazine.

Maybe I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, but there’s nothing fun in computing anymore. If you check out IA and read old copies of Byte or CC, we were all looking forward to the next tech improvement, maybe a 5 MB hard disk that didn’t cost as much as a car, or a printer that finally worked. Maybe sharing a bit of BASIC or assembler code. Is that next computer from Atari going to beat the new Apple II?

These days, eh. Who’s looking forward to anything?

That whole AI thing pass you by?

I am still hoping for a printer that actually works

I have a box of commodore magazines from ~1985 that I'm hanging on to because throwing them out seems wrong.

My wife disagrees.

Is she right?

I have a whole garage shelf filled with National Geographic magazine since 2013—-after I moved to the United States.

Reading natgeo was a dream—-I bought used copies roadside in the bylanes of Kolkata.

Once in a while my SO questions the same. I change the topic and continue to cherish the collection.

Check if they're on the Internet Archive. If yes, toss them. If no, upload them then toss them. Eventually you have your magazines and a happy wife.

Internet archive might not be the best choice given their legal troubles.

You can download them.

I know it’s a lot of trouble, but if you put them on your local Craigslist or freecycle type thing, someone is likely to want them.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

Great for old books that you don’t want taking up space. But, don’t want to lose completely either.

Something to consider is if you might have children and grandchildren who will stumble on them someday. One of my favorite things to do when I visited my grandparents was to go down into their basement and flip through their collections of Life, Popular Mechanics and National Geographic. It gave me a window into life in the decades before I was born in a way that history classes never could. As much as I love the Internet Archive, I would not have found clicking through a digital magazine nearly as absorbing.

I have had similar thoughts, but I suspect this sort of accidental discovery will be less interesting to future generations because of the competing volume of online content. I remember stumbling across a supply of second hand amateur radio magazines (QST and 73) as an 11 year old in the mid-60’s that started me down the tech path. These days I would probably be in front of some sort of screen instead of poking around in my grandparent’s basement or a used bookstore.

I had a reasonable collection of Transactor magazine from the ‘80s. They were formative to my childhood and my love of writing software for my C64. But I had to let them go. I found a good and appreciative home for them and freed up some space. And they are freely available online.

I bet she has some things which you would happily throw out?

I'd rather separate from the wife than my classic magazine collection.

I'm accepting magazine donations for my encyclopedia. If they're something that isn't already available in electronic format then I will scan and upload them.

It's not technically live yet, but there's a couple of test pages up:

https://en.magazedia.wiki/cinefex-no-138

https://en.magazedia.wiki/gq-style-usa-summer-2017

I have something in the order of probably 2 million magazines in various electronic formats that I am working up organizing and uploading.

Your wife should learn to appreciate knowledge and skills outside of her "comfort zone". Her PoV is not the only valid one.

One of my favorite things to do as a teenager growing up was to get a ride to Barnes and noble, grab a coffee, and plant myself on the bench in the periodical section to pour through every page of the latest 2600, desperately trying to commit to my memory as much as possible.

Even in the infantile form of the web where this sort of knowledge and editorial transfer of ideas really ought to have thrived, there was no digital compendium even remotely close to how dense and concisely curated these pages were. It really felt like every new issue was unlocking the next level of the game as the Internet was developing..

> to Barnes and noble, grab a coffee, and plant myself on the bench in the periodical section to pour through every page of the latest 2600, desperately trying to commit to my memory as much as possible

I still go to my local Barnes & Noble, the last one remaining in Seattle, to get my 2600 (and a coffee!) every quarter. Why B&N? No other bookstore in the city sells 2600, at least not reliably.

It's been a quarterly ritual for quite some time, even though I could just get a "lifetime" subscription and have more Hacker Quarterly pages to read than I could do in an actual lifetime. I still enjoy going and getting a paper magazine and reading spill about central offices and script code injection.

I do the same. Every quarter, I head to B&N, grab the latest 2600 and maybe browse for Make:, Nuts & Volts and Linux Format.

I formerly had a subscription to 2600, but canceled it after realizing it was sold at B&N, which surprised me. Not that B&N chose to sell it, but that I could reliably find it in every location I visit. In my head, that meant 2600, a publication I actually care about, was getting exposure to curious minds, and that was important to me. So, I figured buying one at B&N was like me casting my vote that they should continue to carry it for the benefit of a future budding computer enthusiast.

I too go and get 2600 from B&N each quarter.

B&N, while corporate so to speak, is also the last major gasp of fighting the Amazon hegemony. I root for them to succeed.

Here in San Antonio, there are at least three if not four B&N. I know SA has a higher population than Seattle but hearing you only have one is surprising to me.

I go once or twice a month to browse around, occasionally buy a magazine or stationery. The other day during holiday shopping, both locations in my area were quite busy at the register.

I work as an editor for a B2B print and digital magazine (not computers, but I do write about related topics). We're lucky in that we can still financially justify producing a print magazine. Most companies can't--print is still dying a slow, painful death, with only the biggest consumer magazines like Conde Nast publications and particularly large trade magazines still producing print books.

I'm glad I was able to have the experience of producing print magazines--it's a unique line of work, for sure, and I think when I'm older I'll reminisce on this point in my career.

Things are a bit healthier elsewhere: I was in a WHSmith here in Scotland about a month ago and there were three Linux magazines on the shelf. There are others, too, like Computeractive and Retro Gamer.

> Ever since I got my first home computer on Christmas morning, 1982

Oh man, exactly the same. There must be millions of us. [Added: Wikipedia claims "By 1982, an estimated 621,000 home computers were in American households", which might not be up to date with Christmas, but still looks like a no.]

(I started reading Byte in 1981, though. By the late 80s the best years for the magazines were clearly past.)

>Oh man, exactly the same. There must be millions of us.

It must have affected everyone minus the newest generation who learned all about computing online..

I was one of many that spent a lot of time with computer magazines like Computer Shopper. A few years back I was in a bookstore and took a look at the current offerings. There was some shock upon seeing the price, they were quite thin, and the articles had a feel of content written to meet a quota rather than a love of hacking. Maybe it was just the few I checked out that day, but it would not have been rational to buy them rather than a book.

I buy from time to time the German Managazine C'T and i cannot hide the fact that lot's of information in the Magazine i already absorbed from one way or the other. In this day and age of internet, people get easily information through different channels (social media, websites, chat, etc...)

I find the Magazine and the writers very professional but I cannot say it's worth for me to buy the Magazine nowadays.

In the mid-80s I learned Apple II hi-res assembly language graphics from a series of articles in Creative Computing. Based on this, I wrote a tool in BASIC to spit out pre-shifted shape tables for use in games. As a high school kid without access to the Internet, this was the way to get access to knowledge that only professionals had.

I recall reading Spider magazine in Pakistan. It was a magazine about the internet, more than computers. It would have reviews for websites and articles about maintaining online privacy in the early 2000s.

Later on, I contributed some articles to it. Don’t know if it is still going.

The Twitter account has been silent since April 2015

I recently bought a subscription to pcgamer uk pdf edition ( the website is I suspect deliberately unusable ) - much to my surprise, I enjoy reading it that way . I haven’t bought a paper edition in years though.

I used to love that mag and was an avid subscriber during my early to late teens.

Some of their writers went on to create Rock Paper Shotgun which was one of the best blogs out there.

This was posted on here a couple months ago, fun read:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

I've just recently had a shirt printed with the cover of Byte magazine Volume 8 No 6 (June 1983) on the front, because it looks so cool.

When I was a kid, we went for a sports trip far from my home town. As only geek in team, I've brought dozen of computer magazines with me. Oh, the memories.

Those massive Computer Shopper catazines were a great way to spend an afternoon or 12. So much killer hardware to drool over.

I still remember going to Brent Cross shopping center in London when I was 12 years old and buying “your computer”. It felt like magic!

This is purely opinion but the “era of” something is over when it stops growing in popularity.

I learned a lot from computer magazines in the 80s. It’s not really been the same since.

I still have my issue #1 of PC World. I hold on to it like a religious relic.

I still subscribe to retro gamer out of the UK. Kids read it too.

Kinda of poignant that it dovetails with the inflection of AI.

I was a subscriber of Maximum PC until 2014, when I realized I get all my information online.

Nowadays, the people who would've subscribed to computer magazines go online. PC Magazine and PC World moved online and it worked very well for them.

There's far more online, but also misinformation.

> but also misinformation

I've often wondered about this. I grew up loving computer magazines, trusting everything they published. Was there actually more credibility with the information back then, or did it have more to do with the fact that far fewer "sources" had the ability to disseminate information (good or bad) and there was a natural system of checks and balances about what got published? We tended to believe what appeared in print because we assumed the info was verified before ink hit the page. These days, of course, we know better than to just blindly trust sources, but still get tricked into doing so anyway.

I have no answers on this, I guess, but it is something worth thinking about.

From my experience it was more "reliable" in that multiple people had looked at it before it went to print; but they'd make mistakes, too. Half the fun was reading the letters to editor pointing out mistakes.

Deep and wide is no longer fashionable

2600 is still in print

It doesn’t have to.

Imo it’s surprising that this didn’t happen 10 years ago

As sad as this is, what's sadder is that Wired still exists and is diametrically opposed to the values it had when created.

> is diametrically opposed to the values it had when created

And that's likely the reason it still exists. I don't think WIRED really survived the dot-com bubble popping.

I'm a print subscriber to Wired and read it cover to cover most months. I find most issues pretty good and usually learn all kinds of interesting details about things happening in the tech world. They even have a hacker column, in a recent issue the writer talked about his journey setting up and using a raspberry pi based radio telescope. What would you say Wired is missing now compared to its first iterations?

I mostly stopped reading it in ~2021/2022, but from ~2015-2021 it was getting progressively more hostile to tech, fearful of anything new, etc.

I skimmed the online list of articles for the past few months and it does look better (but not 1993-1997 high water mark, or 1997-2021 still ok). There have been two different editors in chief since 2021, maybe that was a factor.

That's interesting and I appreciate your response. I didn't subscribe until 2020 so perhaps I missed the downward swing and have only seen it on the up?

> I mostly stopped reading it in ~2021/2022, but from ~2015-2021 it was getting progressively more hostile to tech, fearful of anything new, etc.

It's would be hard for them to maintain the kind of techo-optimism they had in their early years, without sounding delusional, given what we've learned since.

When I think of wired I think of articles written by andrew hultkrans. I have a video of him I tried to get a discussion on, but even in 1993 he was already mentioning smart cards and tvs.

>What would you say Wired is missing now compared to its first iterations?

Wired's so-called "review" of Hogwarts Legacy is an abomination. <https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/>

PS - Check out the author's other works for the magazine.

Though there was plenty of good content in the years that followed, to me Wired reached its peak when it published Neal Stephenson's 'Hacker Tourist' article.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

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