Back when playing with PCs was one of my hobbies I helped keep the computer press, Ziff-Davis in particular, afloat.
It started with PC Magazine. I have no idea whether PC Magazine had the best writers because it was the wealthiest magazine or if its success stemmed from an editor’s choice of contributors. Edward Mendelson and Neil J. Rubenking are still there. PC Mag’s articles were usually the most clearly written and – back then anyway – often aimed at people who wanted to know something about how things were but didn’t have a background in electronic engineering or programming. There were plenty of stodgy suit-and-tie types as well. I see some of them are still around as well.
And there was and probably always be John Dvorak. Most people who were made angry by Dvorak’s columns didn’t seem to understand that was much of the idea. His snippets were meant to provoke and annoy. It guarantees attention. Yellow journalism. It wasn’t by accident that “Inside Track” had a yellow background. Dvorak’s flaw has always been that he’s funny at best half the time. But he was always more run to read than, say, Bill Howard.
The real star was the PC Mag utilities. First day I had my 1200 bps modem I dialed into their BBS and downloaded the bundle. Later I bought a big fat book containing a passel of them to have the documentation handy. The utilities were focused, tightly written and mostly useful. In recent years I’ve probably downloaded maybe two.
From Ziff-Davis I also bought PC Computing and Computer Shopper. PC Computing was – or does it still exist – was sort of PC Mag Lite. The magazine hasn’t left any impression: another thick collection of clay coated paper that I skimmed negligently and tossed away.
Ads were the stars of Computer Shopper. To be fair advertising sometimes was the most interesting part of any of the magazines (when the articles were ads in themselves). Much of the prose in Computer Shopper was homespun when it wasn’t downright fannish. I thought it was kind of nice they had columns for people who’d yet to abandon their old Timex-Sinclair or Texas Instruments machines. Mostly the articles left me feeling slight embarrassed for the authors. But I did avidly read the the hundreds of pages of ads for motherboards and hard drives I couldn’t afford.
PC World was a stuffy PC Mag. Mostly the same stories, though the software reviews were sometimes better. While I did find it sometimes useful I never learned the name of a single PC World writer.
More techie was Byte. I suspect I wasn’t the only reader who liked it as much for Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” as the rest of the contents combined. Pournelle sometimes attracted as much venom as Dvorak. People would complain that unlike Pournelle they couldn’t get the head technician of a computer maker on the phone. Pournelle’s columns were (I’m sure still are but am not willing to give Byte online money) entertaining tales of fighting with hardware and software. While I liked some of his science fiction novels I got more laughs out of “Chaos Manor.” That his Byte column gave him the ears of key people at software and hardware companies let his stories have something they needed: a quick resolution.
Recently I spent time going to the website equivalents or incarnation of the computer magazines.
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2 comments ↓
I liked the reminiscence of the old days. Back in the mid-90s, an equally computer-goofy friend and I pored over PC Mag, the benchmark scores, etc. Wordperfect vs. Word or Excel vs. 123 was always worth a cover story. I eagerly tried out every autoexec.bat and config.sys tweak they advertised, and even tried writing Procomm Plus scripts for the modem.
When I started out on a Commodore 64, I remember Computer Shopper being the last mag to publish any 64 articles.
I liked PC Computing, esp when Penn Gillette was their back-page columnist. They sometimes had more featurey stories and were a little more relaxed than PC Mag. But Paul Somerson came in as editor, canned Penn, and twisted it into a business-focused mag that didn’t last many more issues (nor did Windows Sources or any of the other spinoff mags). It’s interesting that PC World has hung on as long as it has, since they couldn’t have had deeper pockets than ZD.
When the Ziff family sold off the magazines (the younguns were more interested in managing the Ziff fortune than publishing magazines) and sold the company to Mr. Son, it pretty much all went down the crapper. Not as much fun. Even the utilities (I agree, they were all good) have been spun off into their own money-making realm. The sense of community is long gone.
What I find interesting in the ZD history is they used to publish old pulp magazines, sci-fi, westerns, bride mags, fish and game mags, etc. When they were selling off their assets they could not unload the computer magazines, so they kept publishing them. Somehow, I guess the right combination of editors and writers, the computer mags wound up saving the ZD name and becoming a major force in the magazine publishing field.
With the rise of the web, there’s hardly a need to buy a computer magazine anymore. When I go to the Thrift Store at Lakewood, they have a magazine rack and some old (mid-80s) PC Mags, which feature how-to articles on Manuscript (Lotus’ word processor) and other obscure apps. It’s like looking at something a hundred years old.
Thanks for uncorking that bottle. Didn’t realize I had so much stuff clogging my head on this subject.
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Typically of me that entry was supposed to be about my visits to computer magazine websites and how they compared to the paper originals.
Ziff-Davis was still in the pulp, or by then “digest” market when I was a kid. And I used to really want to own some of the few comics they published. But they were too expensive for the very reason I wanted them: amazingly entertaining paperback covers.
I remember Penn Gillette’s column. For years the only thing I knew about Uma Thurman was that Gillette lusted after her (finally saw her in the awful Avengers movie).
I still look at Dvorak’s column. I’d do the same with Jerry Pournelle’s but you have to pay to read Byte.
Damn, I sure spent lots of time reading about software and hardware that I either didn’t need or couldn’t afford.
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