PC World, 1983-2013 | Hacker News Reader

PC World, 1983-2013

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127 pointsrbanffy54 comments

As PC magazines go, I have to admit, I kinda miss Computer Shopper. Some of my earliest, and fondest, memories of getting started in computing involve poring over issues of that magazine, reading the columns, drooling over the parts advertised in the copious ads, and dreaming about ordering up a motherboard, case, power supply, video card, etc., and building a computer from scratch.

As history would have it, that's pretty close to what I did. I bought a 386DX/40 motherboard and CPU, a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM, and a few other bits, as I pieced together my first PC. Then a guy I went to school with offered to sell me a dead 286 box that had a good power supply, videocard, floppy drives, etc., that I needed, so I bought that, and cobbled together this Frankenstein's PC of a computer. Got myself a 28.8 modem and start exploring BBS's, Tymnet and Telenet networks, reading Phrack magazine, got into phone phreaking and other sordid activities...

Then somehow I got hold of a shareware C compiler, and a copy of Herbert Schildt's book Teach Yourself C. That started an addiction that led to Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, and the need to upgrade my computer to an absurd 4 megabytes of RAM.. and eventually to Borland C++ (the full suite), a whole shelf full of C/C++ books, and my earliest forays into this strange world of something called "linux" and "open source". Then came the Internet, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Freshmeat, BOFH, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Dilbert, etc...

Years later - who knew that this is where it would all lead? wistful sigh

Call me a sentimental old fart, but Computer Shopper will always hold a special place in my heart. :-)

To be honest, an ad in Computer Shopper had a nice means of pitch. In just a few square inches they had to fit their pitch into an ad, maybe with a diagram. I couldn't get tricked into some website signup, they had to make their elevator pitch on paper for what ever product or service was offered.

There was no lying about CS -- you were buying a telephone book sized tome of ads, and that was fine -- that's the reason you got it. It was a virtual analog marketplace. Anything and everything you could have wanted was in there.

Absolutely. Seems almost funny in hindsight, but I absolutely bought Computer Shopper for the ads! The articles were basically an afterthought, most of the time.

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/maths/spreadsheets-t...

I did read some of the articles as it happens, but I know what you mean...

I almost always went right to the back page, for the BBS numbers.

I'd call whatever was local, which wasn't much, but would find the most eclectic treasure troves... found an easy to use gravity simulator once. Took FOREVER to download at probably just a few MB.

It was a weirder online experience then, you really felt like you had something secret, all to yourself.

Very much like my experience. I actually did enjoy the articles, though. Reviews, there were some excellent regular columns, and some nice programming articles too.

I wrote regularly for PC World and NeXTWORLD from 1988 to 1993. The magazine had high standards and my editors, Robert Luhn and Wes Nihei, were demanding, driving me to find ways to enliven laser printer "roundups" with language that was colorful, engaging, and sometimes over the top ("This HP LaserJet, like a Clydesdale of workhorse printers, delivered consistent performance..."). Every day that I write, I remember them, and wish I had them around to improve my prose. But this is the Internet and we no longer have editors.

PC World deserves a eulogy and a better one than this from its archival Ziff-Davis. In those days, magazines created communities. Readers became part of a magazine's world, identifying themselves, forming affinity groups, despite geographic isolation, and without barriers to participation. Something like Hacker News in that regard. The publisher, the editors, the writers, and the advertisers fostered the creation of the community, and the communities created by the computer magazines of the 1980s and 1990s created our technology culture as much, and maybe more, than any single individual or Silicon Valley company. Yes, we say Steve Jobs was a genius, but part of his genius was realizing he needed David Bunnell, the founder of PC World and a former radical political organizer, to create a magazine for the Mac if his new computer was going to succeed. The dirty secret of that time was that Steve Jobs paid Bunnell to publish MacWorld (and later, NeXTWORLD) and the Apple community arose from it. The origin of our present world lies as much with David Bunnell and PC World as with Vint Cerf and DARPA but, sadly, there's no one to tell the tale.

Personally, the only computer magazine I feel sad about not being in print is Byte. I loved that magazine.

I didn't discover Byte until the 1990s, in college. I often sat in the library reading back issues. When I finally subscribed to the magazine myself, I only received a few months' worth before they folded up shop! Great memories nevertheless.

The closure of Byte magazine is a rather sorry tale:

http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html

> I often sat in the library reading back issues

Luckily, my college had a very complete collection of BYTE, dating back to their second or third year. I am quite sure I read everything they had.

I miss Creative Computing, too. It was the philosophy to Byte's technical vision.

Byte was one of the clear contenders for the best (if not the best) general computer magazine - but as an avid commodore 64 hacker back in 1982-1983, Compute!, with it's monthly updates on various things like undocumented 6510 opcodes, and their interesting assembly programs that we typed in by hand (mostly consisting of a bunch of data/poke statements, will always hold a warm place in my heart.

Compute was awesome. Probably the only magazine that actually made me a better programmer.

compute was awesome ..and where i got my start programming

Take a look here: http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/

You're in luck: http://archive.org/details/compute-magazine

I just had a burst of pleasurable nostalgia, followed by the sting of feeling old. ;)

And also.

http://paper.textfiles.com/

I guess you never saw Transactor then? That was the good stuff. Hardware hacks, lengthy assembly source listings, it was hardcore.

There's an archive of scans of every issue here: http://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor/

For me it was Micro Cornucopia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Cornucopia

Dr. Dobb's Journal was another great magazine.

I still enjoy printed material. I subscribe to 3 magazines (which rotate since I do not have time for more) and purchase my non-techie books solely in print.

It was fantastic up until the end of the 90's, but DDJ steadily got more and more bland after that.

There are still specific issues and articles I remember very well, like their article on ternary trees, and various issues on programming languages.

For me it was Byte, DDJ, and Computer Language.

I was reared on DDJ and Byte. At one point there was always at least one gem in each issue of both of them.

Byte was amazing. In the mid-80s I was into the Atari ST platform, and I probably have in storage their "home computing" issue that had an awesome top-down view of the ST [1].

[1] http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1986-03/1986_03_BYTE...

Testify brother any one else notice the shoutout in toy story one to BYTE?

Always wished I had the nerve to get our electronics shop at BHRA to build the modems costing $35 for one project instead of paying £300 for a five answer modems and £600 for an answer originate - highly naughty at the time as you could only connect approved devices to the BT network - as it was we had them taken apart and some components changed to tweak the gain.

> any one else notice the shoutout in toy story one to BYTE?

No. Where is that?

early in the film there is a shot that pans across a book shelf the titles of which are early experimental films done in CGI at least one of which was used as a cover for BYTE.

I cant recall the name unfortunately

BYTE was special, but I also miss Creative Computing.

As per all magazines, it declined to 10% content and 90% advertising that you had to pay a large chunk of cash for. Good riddance to them all.

I seem to remember it being mostly advertising even in the early 90s.

My thought on the headline was "and nothing of value was lost", but thats perhaps unfair since the last time I looked in one was probably 20 years ago.

I used to page through the ads and find the biggest, fastest computers and I'd fantasize about having them. (I was a kid)

That's exactly what I did. Kind of funny now that the only computer I own is a pretty low spec MacBook Air and I'm perfectly content with it.

"low spec" now means "unimaginably fast and powerful" around 1995 and "Martian Supercomputer" in 1985.

At some point recently, we crossed a threshold from being hardware limited to being originality limited (or I did anyway).

Yep, I think we crossed that line with the release of Intel's Core2Duo line of processors. My 2010 MBA actually uses the C2D 2.13ghz, 4GB ram, and a 256GB SSD and it performs perfectly fine for 99% of my uses. Only time I feel bogged down is when I run multiple Play! Framework modules at once.

I remember when the first C2D benchmarks were released, it was hilarious at just how much faster they were than anything else around. Poor AMD hasn't recovered since...

Speaking as somebody born in 1986, PC Magazine and Ziff Davis ignited my interest in software and computers as a child.

It will always have a special place in my heart, even as a relic of print media (Ars Technica and AnandTech have replaced or obsoleted many aspects of the magazine even in its ironic non-computer print death throes of trying to modernize to the Web).

Slim pickings reading wise the decade your were born for computers. I had to drive up to the Princeton U. Bookstore (about 40 miles away) in order to get a book on Unix or C.

The year before you were born I had a machine in which 4mb of memory (in 80's dollars) was something like $4000. That was the cost of the extra memory (the machine was perhaps 35k in 80's dollars approx.) The hard drive was 70mb (Unix multiuser system).

Separately you missed out on the era of hiding Playboy under the bed from mom.

    >in 1991, a fresh-faced CompuServe service dubbed ZDNet—

Apparently the author of the article is not too familiar with Ziff Davis. (PCMag, etc)

(from Wikipedia) In 1989, the company launched the ZDNet site. In 1991 ZDNet on CompuServe and on the fledgling Internet were augmented by the purchase of Public Brand Software, the leading shareware disk provider. In 1995 it launched the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the site Yahoo!.

I picked up on it immediately because I was once a subscriber to several Ziff Davis publications.

</tangent>

The magazine's title always seemed like an omen that death was inevitable.

It makes me wonder...in the faced paced tech world today, where things appear as fast as they disappear, what the odds are of finding a title that stands the test of time.

The Verge seems like a candidate. If you name a tech publication after an aspect of technology itself, like Wired, the name is destined for quaintness.

Verge is French slang for a phallus, which might make it an unpopular title in some regions.

IEEE's "Computer" and "Software" seem able to endure a couple more decades.

Communications of the ACM

I personally prefer a copy in my hand, that I can carry around with me, and flip pages.. the quality of e-ink or tablet displays isn't the same.. I find navigating most e-versions of magazines I've tried to be beyond irritating. I stopped subscribing to Linux Journal when they went electronic only.. I know the reasons why, just the same it was less appealing to me. I still subscribe to Maximum PC, but even that is getting stale now.

Yes, but the BIG question is: with the move to 'digital', are they going make available all those precious back issues in electronic format?

Years back, I eagerly ordered the Byte CDROM archive from DrDobbs. My expectations were dashed: no glossy pdfs, nor even illustrations or ads; the articles were just text files. With those historical mags, along with the technical content, I find context very important...

>PCW and its peer publications—PCMag, but also BYTE, Computer Shopper, and in 1991, a fresh-faced CompuServe service dubbed ZDNet—helped bring a niche interest into the mainstream.

I have fond memories of BYTE and Computer Shopper. I repeatedly pored over the same random issue for Computer Shopper for years before I owned a PC.

More recently, I was sad to see SysAdmin go.

Well, from IDG, I prefered to read ComputerWorld anyway.

It's apparently for IT managers (which I am not), but it at least contains some information, unlike PC World's "top 10 shareware applications of the month" and "let's test this random hardware and put the results in a big table".

I learned a lot from the ads, it was a way to stay current with the latest video card or motherboard, or CPU release. I watched the ads change from cga to VGA to retina, from Athlon and Pentium to the current crop, which interestingly have broadened out to include more variety again, thanks to mobile. I liked ETI a lot too. I suppose these days the need to stay current on hardware has really gone away, we all run little client machines (chrome book/Air etc) and use server side services, even development is mainly on remote machines managed by people who specialize. We are today li tied not by the hardware, but by our creativity. With a few hundred dollars anyone can release software that can reach millions. We've come a lot way since PC world started.

PC World the magazine. Not to be confused with the retailer of the same name (http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/index.html)

Not that I would be too upset if that retail chain closed down.

I really hope somebody has these magazines scanned and archived somewhere. Recently I've been looking at old Amiga and MSX magazines and they're both really fun, but also really good documentation of the era. In a decade or so, a PC World archive could become possibly the only documentation of the release dates and prices of various products and the histories of entire minor industries.

I remember when this was thick as a brick. An engine for printing money. Those were the days.

I predict MacWorld will soon follow up. Sad... I always loved reading PCWorld at the grocery store as a break from the monotony of shopping for food.

Print is dead. The LCD hath killed it. Long live the LCD, and long live e-Ink displays.

RIP, it was inevitable but it served a purpose in its day.

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