
PC World, 1983-2013 - rbanffy
http://www.zdnet.com/pc-world-1983-2013-7000017963/
======
mindcrime
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. :-)

~~~
sown
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.

~~~
mindcrime
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.

~~~
keithpeter
[http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/maths/spreadsheets-t...](http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/maths/spreadsheets-
to-talk-about/index.html)

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

------
DanielKehoe
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.

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

~~~
ghshephard
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.

~~~
nostromo
You're in luck: [http://archive.org/details/compute-
magazine](http://archive.org/details/compute-magazine)

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

~~~
dhughes
And also.

[http://paper.textfiles.com/](http://paper.textfiles.com/)

------
kryten
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.

~~~
nullc
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.

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

~~~
dntrkv
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.

~~~
keithpeter
"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).

~~~
dntrkv
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...

------
jasonjei
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).

~~~
larrys
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.

------
D9u

        >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>

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

~~~
Sven7
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.

~~~
natrius
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.

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

------
tracker1
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.

------
fractallyte
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...

------
incision
_> 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.

------
runn1ng
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".

------
hnriot
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.

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

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

------
bane
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.

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

------
kunai
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.

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

