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The magazine's title always seemed like an omen that death was inevitable.
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.
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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.
IEEE's "Computer" and "Software" seem able to endure a couple more decades.
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.
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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.
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.
Personally, the only computer magazine I feel sad about not being in print is Byte. I loved that magazine.
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.
There's an archive of scans of every issue here: http://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor/
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Testify brother any one else notice the shoutout in toy story one to BYTE? Always wished I had the nerve to get our electronics shop at BHRA to build the modems costing $35 for one project instead of paying £300 for a five answer modems and £600 for an answer originate - highly naughty at the time as you could only connect approved devices to the BT network - as it was we had them taken apart and some components chan…
> any one else notice the shoutout in toy story one to BYTE? No. Where is that?
I cant recall the name unfortunately