
Popular Electronics archives - Someone
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm
======
cantrevealname
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...](http://www.americanradiohistory.com/American-Radio-History-
FAQ.htm)

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

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

~~~
radiodavid
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."

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

------
ChuckMcM
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).

~~~
analognoise
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!

~~~
madengr
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.

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fitzwatermellow
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.

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fdavison
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.

~~~
jnord
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.

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insaneirish
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.

~~~
a_thro_away
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.

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jamescun
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...](http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-
Poptronics/70s/1975/Poptronics-1975-01.pdf)

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sizzzzlerz
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.

~~~
a_thro_away
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.

------
Animats
The very first Carl and Jerry.[1]

[1] [http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-
Poptronics/50s/5...](http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-
Poptronics/50s/54/Pop-1954-10.pdf)

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bane
Also available through IA
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=popular%20electronics](https://archive.org/search.php?query=popular%20electronics)

~~~
cylinder714
As well as the entire run of Wayne Green's 73 Magazine, for amateur radio
enthusiasts:
[https://archive.org/details/73-magazine](https://archive.org/details/73-magazine)

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ocdtrekkie
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

~~~
a_thro_away
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 :-)

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madengr
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?

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sverige
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.

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eddanger
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).

