
Home for the holidays, and for a 20-year-old issue of PC Magazine - Thevet
http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2014/12/26/7451295/home-for-the-holidays-and-for-a-20-year-old-issue-of-pc-magazine
======
johnclyman
Fond memories. I was the editor in charge of that cover story and wrote
several sections.

I still remember personally inspecting the innards of the 165 machines that
the team exhaustively tested in the lab. The effort we all put in to produce
more than 60 data-heavy print pages for a single story was brutal, but seeing
the physical magazine that got delivered to more than a million subscribers
was tremendously satisfying.

It was an amazing time for the industry. Processors kept improving by leaps
and bounds, decent graphics and "multimedia" (which we take entirely for
granted today) were rapidly becoming a reality, and software was getting more
interesting by the day. To put the timing in context, it was about a year
before the Netscape IPO and emergence of widespread visibility of the World
Wide Web.

PCs were still a costly investment. The Dell machine that was one of our
Editors' Choices cost over $3,000. For that -- about $5,000 in today's dollars
-- you'd get a 90-MHz Pentium processor, 16MB of RAM, a 1GB IDE drive, and a
15-inch CRT monitor driven by a graphics card with 2MB of RAM. Compare that
with, say, the phone you carry in your pocket every day...

~~~
mgkimsal
I started off with 1k, then 16k. 16meg was a Big Deal(tm). And now... 16gig
isn't really enough. All this over... 30 years.

I think now I've got icons bigger than 16meg. The size/speed/space of
computing continues to slightly amaze/boggle me, but only because I saw it 30
years ago. I don't think most people looking at it today can grasp the
magnitude of the changes.

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w1ntermute
> And now, today, I'm a founding editor of a publication that I consider
> something of a spiritual successor to those classic mags.

 _The Verge_ might have started out as a "spiritual successor" to PC Magazine
et al., but it certainly can't be considered one these days. Many of the
founding members have left and the site has lost touch with its
technical/gadget roots and has instead turned into a far-let "cultural"
publication. For me, Chris Plante's completely unwarranted attack on one of
the Rosetta scientists[0] was the last straw. Nowadays, I avoid _The Verge_ as
much as possible.

0: [http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213819/your-bowling-
shir...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213819/your-bowling-shirt-is-
holding-back-progress)

~~~
thrownaway2424
It's a ridiculous assertion that a site founded three years ago has wandered
from its roots. As for that guy's shirt, it's hardly takes a Marxist to think
it's in poor taste.

~~~
NeutronBoy
Worth noting that the shirt was made for him by a female friend of his.

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dsr_
PC Magazine didn't have anything on Computer Shopper when you wanted to figure
out the best price on a PC. Imagine over a thousand pages of newsprint, with
about 850 of them being 100% ads.

It's hard to grep a dead tree, of course.

The best thing was that Computer Shopper could afford to print decent articles
-- Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on the first PC UNIXen, cool things to do by
writing PostScript to your printer -- after PC Magazine started thinking that
those things were too geeky for their business-focused audience. (Six word-
processors under $1495 compared!)

~~~
EvanAnderson
I regret throwing out my old Computer Shopper magazines. Their form factor was
sub-optimal for long term storage, but they would be a ton of fun to look
through today.

Edit:

Looks like there are a few issues (from the 2000-2002 timeframe) at the
Internet Archive:
[https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper](https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper)

I'd love to see some early to mid-90's issues.

~~~
pronoiac
I found one! Computer Shopper, December 1997: "Holiday Hit! $2,499 - fully
loaded 300 MHz Pentium II"

Also two J&R catalogs, winter 1998 and the orher's undated. And an OS/2 Warp
Demonstration Disk 3 1/2" floppy, and various other floppies, 5 1/4" included.

Edit: ah, I _was_ going to take the CS to the Internet Archive to scan, but
the size might be a problem for their scanners. Thoughts?

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bitwize
These days we consider John C. Dvorak to be a safely ignorable douchebag, like
Glenn Beck. But back when PC Mag was a thing, a 200+-page tome that came in
the mail each and every month, his wry and humorous industry commentary was
something of a respite from the dry, business-focused news we expected from
much of the PC journalism industry.

~~~
yuhong
I remember reading the writing about parts of what I now call the MS OS/2 2.0
fiasco, particularly the "Microsoft Munchkins" part.

------
Impossible
I've adopted a similar tradition and I think I have that same issue of PC
Magazine in my old room at my parent's house. The majority of old magazines I
have are old video game magazines, specifically CGW.

This practice has prompted me to go back to issues of CGW that pre-dated me
(the earliest CGW I have is from 93) in the archives
([http://www.cgwmuseum.org/](http://www.cgwmuseum.org/)). It's cool to see the
juxtaposition of classic, influential hits with games that had good ideas or
themes (often themes that have yet to be revisited) but poor implementations
along with forgotten clones that don't really stand out.

The game developer magazine archives
([http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag](http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag)) are equally
good for getting an overview of this history of game development. Early issues
are hardcore technical issues about low level things we now take for granted.
Later issues focus largely on diversity, political and community issues in the
game industry with the occasional high level technical article.

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WalterBright
I have a complete set of PC Mag going back to the late 80's. I was thinking
about scanning them in, but Google beat me to it.

I do have a lot of other computer mags scanned in. I should probably see about
getting permission to make them available online. I have a soft spot for
Creative Computing from the mid 1970's. :-)

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rbanffy
It's really interesting to explore the past like this. We often forget where
we have been and who we were. It's easy to remember the time when 1024x768 and
256 colors was "workstation grade graphics" and 8 megabytes of RAM were only
found on expensive RISC machines, but it's not so easy to remember how we did
things and how we accomplished our goals with that kind of tool.

I remember my joy when I discovered my college had (in the mid-80's) a fairly
complete collection of IEEE's Computer, Software, Communications of the ACM
and BYTE. I spent countless hours diving into the past, understanding how we
got where we were. That knowledge, not only of what is, but of why and how, is
incredibly valuable.

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jonathanoliver
Back in 1999 I finally decided to toss my pile of PC Magazine and Computer
Shopper issues. It felt like I was throwing away part of my soul. To this day
I still have some regret over that decision.

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johns
PC magazine was instrumental to my career in tech. I loved when a new one
arrived and would read every page. It taught me so much about IT at the age of
12 that I never would have learned if I just played with computers. I even got
something printed in Abort, Retry, Fail once and wore the t-shirt I got in
return with pride for many years. This post does a good job of capturing the
optimism that was embedded in a every issue (except Dvorak's columns). I miss
that feeling.

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CurtMonash
Young whippersnappers! My first PC didn't have a hard disk, and my second was
an IBM XT with 10 megs, only 4 of which were usable.

I learned to program on punch cards, standing in line to feed them into a
system that occupied a large room and was probably fairly state-of-the-art for
1973.

And when I say that I exclude the one Basic program I wrote even earlier on
paper tape.

At least this machine was at UCLA, so I won't say that to get to the computer
I had to walk barefoot in the snow, uphill in both directions ...

~~~
acqq
And I actually wrote a machine code which I entered bit by bit with the
switches over the front panel:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel)

------
300bps
For me it is Compute!'s Gazette from 1986 to 1990 that brings out the computer
nostalgia. Taught me how to code in BASIC and 6502 Assembly on my Commodore
64. Still go back and read it in PDF format every now and then.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
I remember typing programs from Compute! into our C64 while my dad waited
semi-patiently for me to finish and demo the results, so he could get back to
watching TV (never owned a monitor so had to use the family TV, was years
before I got a disk drive.) I fondly recall these times.

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mwfunk
I'm as nostalgic as anyone about that era and greatly enjoyed the article, but
the thing that really stood out to me was the mystery of why his mom doesn't
just tell him, "you want to keep all this stuff that's taking up space in my
house? Great, take it home with you and I won't throw it away!" This might
make me a bad person, but in this case I'm totally OK with that designation.

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icedchai
I remember getting a 486 DX4/100 right around then! It was a crazy upgrade
from my previous Intel box (a 386SX-16).

I installed Slackware on it.. This was right around 1.0 kernel, I think.

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bluedino
You can browse a lot of these old issues with Google Books

