The Computer Press

The Hobbyist Magazines

The first wave arrived with the first machines people could own. Creative Computing came first, founded by David H. Ahl in October 1974, an alumnus of DEC where he had produced an educational newsletter. It was the least technical of the three and the most fun, aimed at teachers, students and anyone who wanted to make a computer do something amusing. Subscriptions went from 2,500 in August 1975 to about 60,000 by 1978.

Byte followed in September 1975, founded by Wayne Green and Carl Helmers in Peterborough, New Hampshire, at $10 a year. It took the opposite line: schematics, chip datasheets, memory maps, and articles that assumed the reader owned a soldering iron. McGraw-Hill bought it in April 1979, when it had 156,000 paid subscribers. By 1982 circulation was 420,000 and the magazine earned $9 million on $36.6 million of revenue. Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” column showed readers how to build hardware, and Jerry Pournelle’s “The View From Chaos Manor” was a science fiction writer’s running account of his own machines failing, which turned out to be the most relatable thing in the magazine. Robert Tinney painted the covers from December 1975 to September 1990, and they are the reason back issues still get collected.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal began in January 1976 from Bob Albrecht’s People’s Computer Company, with Dennis Allison, under a title that tells you everything about the period: dr. dobb’s journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte. The name was Dennis and Bob compressed; the subtitle was a joke about the memory budget. It existed to distribute community implementations of Tiny BASIC, a stripped-down interpreter Allison had described in print so that people could have a language without paying for one. That origin puts it directly opposite Microsoft’s position in the same argument (see The Open Letter to Hobbyists). Three photocopied issues were planned. Demand turned it into a magazine that ran for 38 years. Jim Warren was its first editor.

Type-In Code

The defining format of the hobbyist era was the program listing: pages of BASIC or assembly that the reader typed in by hand, debugged by hand when a character was wrong, and then owned. Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games (1978), an expansion of a DEC book from 1973, was the first computer book to sell a million copies, and it was a book of listings.

This was software distribution before software distribution. It also made the magazines participatory in a way their successors were not: readers sent in programs, corrections and improvements, and the letters column was a slow asynchronous discussion forum with a two-month round trip (see The Rise of Developer Communities).

The Trade Press

A separate industry served people who bought computers with company money. Computerworld was founded by Patrick J. McGovern in Boston, first issue 21 June 1967, and it built International Data Group into a publishing operation that eventually ran the brand in 47 countries, as Computerwoche in Germany and Computer Sweden in Sweden. It was a weekly newspaper about the data-processing business: procurement, mainframe pricing, personnel moves, lawsuits. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s it was the leading trade publication in the industry.

The trade weeklies mattered because they were where the industry argued with itself in public, and because they were thick with recruitment advertising, which is a good measure of an industry’s actual health and a fragile business to depend on.

Ziff-Davis and the Fat Years

The IBM PC created a consumer market large enough to support magazines that were mostly advertising. PC Magazine launched with a first issue dated February–March 1982, founded by David Bunnell with Jim Edlin and Cheryl Woodard. It carried an interview with Bill Gates, which Bunnell got through a friendship dating from his years as a technical writer at MITS in Albuquerque, where he had edited Computer Notes, one of the first publications devoted to personal computers. Ziff-Davis took it over almost immediately. Bunnell and much of his staff walked out and founded PC World by early 1983, which is a fair summary of how the industry’s labour market worked.

The scale is hard to convey now. PC Magazine went biweekly in January 1984 and ran to roughly 400 pages an issue. Print circulation peaked at 1.2 million in the late 1990s. Ziff-Davis also bought Creative Computing from Ahl in 1982 and pushed it toward business readers; when Bill Ziff’s health forced a consolidation, it was closed in December 1985 despite around 500,000 subscriptions.

The Reviewer as Regulator

What the fat magazines bought with their advertising revenue was a testing capability no individual buyer could match. PC Labs, set up at PC Magazine’s New York offices in 1986 under William Wong, was one of publishing’s first formal hardware-testing operations. It wrote its own benchmarks and ran comparative reviews across dozens of machines. A magazine that could measure things was a magazine whose verdict changed what people bought, which is a peculiar amount of power for a publication funded by the companies it was measuring, and the conflict was a permanent subject of complaint.

The clearest demonstration that it could work came from Germany. In 1995 c’t examined SoftRAM95, a widely sold utility that claimed to double a Windows machine’s memory, and reported that it did essentially nothing, calling it placebo software. The product was pulled from the German and American markets. Testing a shipping product until it confessed is the function the computer press performed that no other institution was performing.

c’t and the German-Language Press

c’t – Magazin für Computertechnik first appeared in November 1983 from Heinz Heise in Hanover, monthly at first and biweekly since October 1997. It reaches roughly 321,000 readers an issue with about 241,000 subscriptions, which makes it the most-subscribed computer magazine in Europe, and it kept the deep-technical register that Byte abandoned. Its publisher also runs iX for IT professionals and, since the 1990s, heise online, which became the German-language news source of record for computing and is cited throughout this encyclopedia (see Germany’s IT Industry and CeBIT).

That c’t is still publishing while nearly all of its American contemporaries are gone is worth noticing. A magazine whose readers pay for it by subscription survived the loss of advertising that killed magazines whose readers were the product being sold to advertisers.

Television

The Computer Chronicles ran on PBS from 5 February 1984 to 25 June 2002, 428 episodes, after starting as a local Bay Area programme in 1981. Stewart Cheifet hosted throughout; Gary Kildall, the author of CP/M, co-hosted for years (see Gary Kildall and the OS IBM Didn’t Take), and Jim Warren presented as well. It was dubbed into Arabic, French and Spanish.

It is now the single most useful video record of the period, because it did the unglamorous thing: each week it put the current products on a table and had someone demonstrate them, on camera, without knowing which ones would matter. Almost all episodes are on the Internet Archive.

Wired

Wired was a different proposition: not a computer magazine but a magazine about what computers were doing to everything else. Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe founded it in 1991 and published the first issue on 6 January 1993 from San Francisco. Nicholas Negroponte saw a prototype at TED in February 1992, became its first investor, and wrote a column for six years.

Its design was the argument as much as its writing: fluorescent inks and metallics on six-colour presses normally reserved for annual reports. The New York Times compared its cultural position to Rolling Stone’s in the 1960s. Condé Nast bought the magazine for $90 million in June 1998.

Dead End: The Business Model

The computer magazines did not fail because readers stopped wanting the information. They failed because the information stopped needing to be printed and, more decisively, because the advertising left.

A 400-page PC Magazine was a product catalogue with journalism wrapped around it. Once vendors could reach buyers directly through their own sites, and once search engines could deliver a purchase-ready reader for a fraction of a page rate, the catalogue function collapsed. Classified and recruitment advertising, the trade press’s other pillar, went to job boards. Reviews faced the same substitution: a benchmark lab is expensive, and a comment thread of people who own the product is free.

The dates line up. CMP Media bought Byte from McGraw-Hill in May 1998 and shut the print magazine immediately, ending with the July 1998 issue and laying off the staff; two attempts to run the name online ended in 2013. PC Magazine fell to about 600,000 print circulation by 2008 and printed its last issue in January 2009. Dr. Dobb’s ended print in February 2009 and stopped publishing new material on 31 December 2014, after 38 years. Computerworld printed its last edition on 23 June 2014.

What Was Lost, and Who Kept It

Two things went with the magazines. The first is adversarial testing: an independently funded lab that measures a product against the vendor’s claims and prints the number. Some of that migrated to well-funded review sites, some to individual reviewers, and much of it simply stopped.

The second is the record. The computer press documented the industry week by week, including everything that turned out not to matter, which is exactly what later historians need and exactly what nobody has a commercial reason to preserve. Much of it survives through volunteer scanning projects and the Internet Archive rather than through the publishers, whose own web archives have often been deleted outright in platform migrations (see Link Rot and the Digital Dark Age). This encyclopedia’s account of the 1970s and 1980s rests on those scans: Byte’s contemporary reviews of machines nobody remembers, Computerworld’s coverage of companies that no longer exist, and the advertisements, which are frequently the only surviving evidence of what a product cost and what it claimed to do.

📚 Sources

• Byte (magazine) — Wikipedia — founded September 1975 by Wayne Green and Carl Helmers in Peterborough at $10 a year, the April 1979 McGraw-Hill purchase at 156,000 subscribers, 420,000 circulation and $9 million on $36.6 million of revenue in 1982, Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” and Pournelle’s “The View From Chaos Manor”, Robert Tinney’s covers from December 1975 to September 1990, and the CMP purchase and immediate closure in May 1998 with the July 1998 final issue
• Dr. Dobb’s Journal — Wikipedia — January 1976, Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison at the People’s Computer Company, the full original title and the derivation of “Dobb’s”, Tiny BASIC and the planned three photocopied issues, Jim Warren as first editor, the ownership chain to Informa, the end of print in February 2009 and of new content on 31 December 2014
• Creative Computing — Wikipedia — David H. Ahl and the October 1974 founding, the DEC background, subscriptions from 2,500 in 1975 to about 60,000 in 1978, BASIC Computer Games (1978) as the first million-selling computer book, the 1982 Ziff-Davis sale, roughly 500,000 subscriptions at peak, and closure in December 1985
• Computerworld — Wikipedia — Patrick J. McGovern and IDG, first issue 21 June 1967, the 47-country brand including Computerwoche and Computer Sweden, its position as the leading trade publication of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the final print edition of 23 June 2014
• PC Magazine — Wikipedia — the February 1982 founding by David Bunnell, Jim Edlin and Cheryl Woodard, the Gates interview in the first issue, the Ziff-Davis takeover and the walkout that produced PC World, biweekly from January 1984 at roughly 400 pages, peak print circulation of 1.2 million, PC Labs under William Wong from 1986, and the January 2009 final print issue
• c’t — Wikipedia — first published November 1983 by Heinz Heise in Hanover, biweekly since October 1997, roughly 321,000 readers and 241,000 subscriptions as Europe’s most-subscribed computer magazine, the sister titles iX and heise online, and the 1995 SoftRAM95 “Placebo-Software” exposé and its consequences
• The Computer Chronicles — Wikipedia — the local 1981 start and the PBS run from 5 February 1984 to 25 June 2002, 428 episodes, Stewart Cheifet with Gary Kildall and Jim Warren, the Arabic, French and Spanish dubs, and the Internet Archive availability
• Wired (magazine) — Wikipedia — founded 1991 by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe with the first issue on 6 January 1993, Negroponte as first investor after TED in February 1992 and columnist for six years, the six-colour printing and fluorescent inks, the New York Times comparison to Rolling Stone, and the $90 million Condé Nast purchase in June 1998