The End of Computer Magazines in America (technologizer.com) 69
With Maximum PC and MacLife's abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century -- and was quite a run. Harry McCracken writes: The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you -- assuming there is a newsstand near you. They're the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only. But I'm not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I'm writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.
It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn't paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG's PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.
It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn't paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG's PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.
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Man, you sent me down a memory hole with this one. IRQ DIP settings!
We're definitely in a different era now than we were even in the early 2000s. The heyday technical limitations you talk of (the 1980s, and early 90s) feel, in retrospect, to have more in common with the 1950s than modern computing. A lot has changed - it's an entirely different world.
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IRQ DIP switches ? You were lucky to have those. Many boards came with sets of jumpers. Now get off my lawn.
Jumpers? What jumpers? (Score:1)
Some boards came hard-wired to one IRQ setting, and we LIKED* it that way!
Tough on you if you had two boards that insisted on using the same IRQ.
* not really, but it sounds retro-cool to say it that way
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It wasn't just IRQs also, but ports. My Adaptec 1542 SCSI card and my Roland MPU-401 both defaulted to I/O port 0330h. You could change that via jumpers. But if you changed the port on the Roland, games would fail to detect it. If you changed the default port on the SCSI card, the BIOS would fail to boot as it was hardcoded to 0330h. I ended up patching the Adaptec BIOS to use an alternate address, so it could still boot. There was a simple checksum that I had to get past as I recall. I debugged this with
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if you changed the port on the Roland, games would fail to detect it.
Did they not have an environment variable like the sound blaster driver? That was clever.
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No, there was no environment variable for the Roland. Cards came set to 0330h by default and most DOS programs only addressed that default. The Windows 3.x MPU-401 driver allowed you to choose an alternate port, if you used a sequencer, but that was no help for games.
In practice, many games ignored the SB environment variable. It was often setup wrong in the first place. There are other ways to detect the SB card at the hardware level by trying various ports/IRQ/DMA. I wrote that type of code for DOS games
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In practice, many games ignored the SB environment variable.
This. It was basically just a way of letting the games know where your SB was. Or where you thought it was. Only a portion of games actually used it.
In practice, many games and other software (for example, music software) were coded to assume your soundcard used manufacturer defaults - IRQ, DMA, port...if you had changed them because of hardware conflicts, you were sh*t out of luck more often than not. Your software would produce no sound at all, would give you digital sound but no AdLib music, would give y
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Fond memories of the era, just not of that aspect in particular
Yeah, this is another example of "the past is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
I too have fond memories of the late 20th century, but the tech was so much more, um, "ancient," than today's.
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Nobody got it. I fixed everyones computers and they, honestly, they thought I was freaking genius.
Suddenly I feel like I should thank IBM for such a ass backwards, inside out, throw it in the kitchen sink approach, but, that is quickly replaced with revulsion for that insanity. Get me outta here.
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... Byte magazine ... read it cover-to-cover.
What era?
The "good" era of Byte would take a month to read cover-to-cover. The dying era would take 10 minutes.
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Re:I assume this is most of the developed world (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ah Computer Shopper. Back when we not only wanted ads, we paid for an entire phonebook-size magazine just so we could read the ads. Man I wish I had held onto some of those from the late 80's. I do still have a Byte magazine somewhere from around then.
I miss Computer Shopper far more than I miss any of the computer "journalist" mags (Well, save MacWorld back in the 90's and early 2000's). Computer Shopper was like the Sears Christmas catalog for computer nerds. It had all the toys you ever wanted. Software ads too. And, ahhh, all the ads for the mom-and-pop PC building shops. I still remember ads for long-departed builders like "Blue Rose Computer Company". Often run out of people's garages. This is the same era that small builders would lease one of tho
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Came her for computer shopper (Score:2)
Man it was like christmas going through that whole bitch looking for a good deal on RAM.
You assume wrong. (Score:2)
You should come back to blighty at some point, plenty still here.
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Re: I assume this is most of the developed world (Score:3)
JuicedGS is still in print. This article is wrong.
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Do magazines for legacy/retrocomputing/obsolete/whatever platforms count? If so, I suspect there are several other publications still extant. For most people and most purposes, though, I'd be inclined to say it doesn't count.
(I say this as an owner of multiple Apple IIGSes (and some IIes and a II+), though I've never subscribed to Juiced.GS. I had a Nibble subscription from 1985 until publication ended in the mid-90s (and had a program published in the April 1990 issue), and a
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Do magazines for legacy/retrocomputing/obsolete/whatever platforms count?
I used to have years worth of Rainbow magazines for the CoCo, which all got destroyed in a flood in the mid 2000's. As the years progress, I increasingly realize the value of what was lost.
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Is there an archive (whether fully legal or otherwise) of those magazines of which you could acquire a copy? The publisher of Nibble made the whole collection available on DVD a while back for a reasonable cost, so I snagged a copy and read it into my media server.
Before my decades-long involvement with the Apple II, I learned BASIC on my grandfather's CoCo and was starting to pick up 6809 as
Wait, Harry McCracken? RIP MaximumPC (Score:2)
But seriously, MaximumPC was the only magazine I got in the mail and now I'm stuck reading it on an e-device after registering for an account on pocketmags.com. I have read this magazine for years and have about 1 year left on my subscription and won't renew. Maybe I'm old but I liked flipping through the actual pages and dread having to find an iPad, phone and/or computer to read a magazine. On the plus side, I don't have to go to the mailbox as it'll be full of advertisements a
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I was reading it from the 1st issue, when it was called boot magazine.
Made a few grand as a side hustle, fixing & upgrading PCs from what I learned
Ah, memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Who else here remembers typing in machine code for a game from a magazine listing?
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I remember doing this for a game on a TRS-80! And boy were typos a pain to find!
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Yup. The endless debugging required for typos (either the user's or the publisher's). That was mostly the pre-PC 8-bit era when every home computer brand had it's own magazine (or more than one). 80Micro for TRS-80, Compute! for Commodore, Analog for Atari, Nibble for Apple ][, and a few that tried to cover them all like Creative Computing and Byte.
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And using the cassette drive to store your programs so all that typing didn't go to waste. Wish I still had my old Commodore stuff. And the stacks of Compute! magazines.
I think I am going to go cry now.
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Yup. Though with the TRS-80 is was more like typing in a bunch of POKEs in a BASIC program. Many of us didn't have assemblers.
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I did a lot of that on a TI-994A.
All the days of cassette tape disk systems.
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Not for games. But I remember when the source code for PGP was published in a book as well as being distributed on various types of digital media. Distributing said media beyond US borders was considered to be a violation of "munitions" export laws. But the book was protected by first amendment rights. Anyone anywhere in the world could buy the book, and either scan/OCR the source or type it in by hand.
I wonder if this subtle distinction remains and whether we might be losing something with the end of pape
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popular electronics from the 70's and 80's was my reading material when I was growing up. the pcb prints could be cut out from the page and used for photo or hand drawn resist ink. then use that to tap drill center punch tools and then finally drill your board after you etch it. before people had easy access to photo copiers so that one magazine pcb art was your only one and you had to be careful with it.
there was typing code in, too; but using the photo pcb routing image to actually create boards, that
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oh yeah, baby. there were some pretty damn good games for the C64 in the back of some of them.
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MPC died years ago. (Score:1)
What's been running around was a crappy fanzine in the original's skinsuit.
They still exist? (Score:2)
I didn't realize anyone was still printing computer magazines. By now they must be nothing but print ads for mypillow, arthritis meds, and similar old person products.
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I'm surprised they were still printing. The readers of a tech magazine would just as happily go to a website, but even those have tended to die off or get replaced by organizations that started out on the web. I've found that even websites are starting to get replaced by people/groups that started with YouTube.
It's hard for a magazine to compete when it's print only and has a monthly de
Still plenty in print here... (Score:3)
... in the UK including at least 2 (might be 3, not sure) linux magazines which can be found in most WHSmith newsagents.
Personally I prefer print for reading long articles, I get less eyestrain but YMMV.
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WHSmith!!
It's been decades since I thought of them. Spent a lot of time & money in their stores in the mid-70s when I was mostly living in Montreal & other parts of Eastern Canada
Re: Still plenty in print here... (Score:2)
Never knew they were ever in canada. Interesting to know.
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Never knew they were ever in canada. Interesting to know.
At one point the Canadian ops were independenlty & domestically owned & they renamed the company to SmithBooks, then merged with competitor Coles to become Chapters which later merged with Indigo which began expanding into the American market in 2019 - I wish them luck.
See more complete history at https://www.chapters.indigo.ca... [indigo.ca]
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Ahh brings back memories of the demise of the Amiga magazines (CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga Shopper, Amiga Computing...) in the late 1990s to early 2000s - and the launch of the first mainstream Linux magazine in the UK at the same time.
Time marches on!
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Practical Electronics is still in print, and available in WH Smiths. But there are few adverts, so it must be hard to keep going. I'll miss it when it goes, been reading that since the 1970s
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I think there's two Linux magazines in the UK now - Linux Format and Linux Magazine. Both are good, though expensive. I miss the days when Linux Voice and Linux User & Developer were also published each month as well.
I was surprised to see Amiga Addict and Pixel Addict magazine being sold in WH Smiths. Who would think that a regular* Amiga mag would be sold in shops in 2023?
* It seems to be published every 6 weeks.
Well they still exist... (Score:2)
,,,in the rest of the world.
The biggest issue is the price tags. Here in Sweden a magazine would cost you from 15$ to 40$ each issue. The news stands are full of them still, but they average around 20$ each, and it's just too expensive.
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Oh, there are still plenty of magazines in the US too, but most are pretty mainstream at this point - stuff you might pick up at your local supermarket. Lots of women's fashion, some hunting and sports, or hobbyist. Many people still seem to enjoy the visceral aspect of paging through real books and magazines. But I suspect a lot of the niche or specialty magazines are now gone.
A few I remember fondly are the C/C++ User's Journal and Dr. Dobbs. I was still in college when I was subscribed, and I really
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I agree with your points.
And there's something special about picking up a really nice glossy magazine with a well written report on a subject, and just turning off the computers in the house, fire up some wood and just lean back and enjoy it page by page.
I'd still buy those, but the markup prices on magazines here are just insane, the magazine could say 6$ UK, or US, but in Sweden there's a price tag slapped on them marking them up to well above 20$ and that becomes a bit to hard to swallow since salaries h
Well technically... (Score:2)
Some associations still publish on paper, though they are sending out much less than they used to. ACM [acm.org] (Communications) for instance. Any year now, they're going to start charging me extra for paper copies, like the stockbrokers do for various communications. I find the online version more efficient to read - easy to choose only the articles that look interesting from the title - but the paper copy is easier to read. And sometimes I find an interesting article while skimming the paper copy that I wouldn't h
I miss... (Score:2)
I miss Byte and Computer Shopper.
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computer shopper was great cause once you were done with it you could roll it up and kill rats with it
Last time I bought a tech magazine (Score:2)
The last time I bought a tech magazine off a news stand was 2007, and it already felt like a nostalgia trip. That might have been my first purchase of such a thing in more than 10 years. It's amazing what things keep soldiering on after most people have given up. Take a look at how long telegrams lasted.
- magazines sprouted entrepreneurs - (Score:5, Interesting)
I only once paid for software in the early days. Saw a magazine ad for some Apple ][ software and mailed a check (remember those?). Got two 5" floppies in return.
It was home accounting software called 'MoneyCounts' and very affordable. I had some correspondence with the seller, a guy working out of his home in Iowa. Seemed like a nice guy, perhaps a bit religious.
Today he is known as Bob Parsons, founder of GoDaddy and much more. His reputation has had ups and downs but he continues to be an early digital entrepreneur who has been a big success- thanks largely to a small magazine ad.
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Paper checks still exist. :P
Byte & Boardwatch in their heyday (Score:2)
Man, I was excited when Byte came in in at over 500 pages!! Weeks of reading. Another fave was Boardwatch in the BBS and early ISP days. I kept those around for years as references. Even just for the ads.
Dr. Dobbs (Score:3)
At least until the late 80's, Dr Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia was the best. Followed by Byte.
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Yeah, them plus Kilobaud / Microcomputing, Compute!, Transactor (for C64, had a letter published in it), and other smaller mag's and newsletters.
I have a complete set of the Kilobauds, and the first four years of Byte sitting in my book shelves.
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Still going in Australia (Score:2)
Surprisingly Australian Personal Computer is still putting out a dead tree edition along with PC PowerPlay (focused on PC gaming) and even a magazine for electronics enthusiasts (a market that's even more niche)
Why would I buy a magazine? (Score:1)
Stop killing trees to produce ad impressions in meatspace. I can get ads for free online, and you can't even wipe your ass satisfactorily with glossy paper.
2600, phrack, reality hackers, more (Score:2)
oh yeh! here's to phreakers draper and crew. Mike Wilkerson and COSMOS. learned from those ...
mags were not all square back then ... cool zines :)
Still have my MacAddict magazines (Score:2)
i'm still waiting... (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for the final issues of my 3 year subscription to Byte. Byte was closed midway. Such a pity!
Byte was it! (Score:2)
If I recall correctly, articles in Byte gave me a BASIC program that generated the Fern fractal.
And cheat codes for DOOM (IDSPISPOPD!)