back
29 comments
Fond memories. I was the editor in charge of that cover story and wrote several sections.

I still remember personally inspecting the innards of the 165 machines that the team exhaustively tested in the lab. The effort we all put in to produce more than 60 data-heavy print pages for a single story was brutal, but seeing the physical magazine that got delivered to more than a million subscribers was tremendously satisfying.

It was an amazing time for the industry. Processors kept improving by leaps and bounds, decent graphics and "multimedia" (which we take entirely for granted today) were rapidly becoming a reality, and software was getting more interesting by the day. To put the timing in context, it was about a year before the Netscape IPO and emergence of widespread visibility of the World Wide Web.

PCs were still a costly investment. The Dell machine that was one of our Editors' Choices cost over $3,000. For that -- about $5,000 in today's dollars -- you'd get a 90-MHz Pentium processor, 16MB of RAM, a 1GB IDE drive, and a 15-inch CRT monitor driven by a graphics card with 2MB of RAM. Compare that with, say, the phone you carry in your pocket every day...

I started off with 1k, then 16k. 16meg was a Big Deal(tm). And now... 16gig isn't really enough. All this over... 30 years.

I think now I've got icons bigger than 16meg. The size/speed/space of computing continues to slightly amaze/boggle me, but only because I saw it 30 years ago. I don't think most people looking at it today can grasp the magnitude of the changes.

> And now, today, I'm a founding editor of a publication that I consider something of a spiritual successor to those classic mags.

The Verge might have started out as a "spiritual successor" to PC Magazine et al., but it certainly can't be considered one these days. Many of the founding members have left and the site has lost touch with its technical/gadget roots and has instead turned into a far-let "cultural" publication. For me, Chris Plante's completely unwarranted attack on one of the Rosetta scientists[0] was the last straw. Nowadays, I avoid The Verge as much as possible.

0: http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213819/your-bowling-shir...

I stopped reading The Verge when the editorial shift happened as well. The Verge was an interesting experiment. What happens when core employees leave the big company and start their own?

>"..."The AOL Way", a 58-page long company plan to grow AOL into a media empire. Some employees suggested that AOL was sacrificing journalism for page views"

At first, they stuck to their core tech/gadget proficiencies and continued with what worked at Engadget. But as they moved further away from 'This is my next' to 'The Verge', they shifted the editorial focus and began sacrificing journalism for the promotion of 'progressive idealism' rather than 'page views' - and the result is much the same.

I didn't see that post originally. I saw the 'follow up' where one of the writers complained about getting abuse on twitter. That's obviously wrong but I find it hard to have sympathy for someone who attacks someone who innocent1y made a mistake and then cried as they apologies on camera. It seems that on the internet it's no longer possible naively do something wrong (and I would argue there was nothing wrong with him wearing that shirt), apologize, and move on. Writers who want to get clicks will try to drum up rage anyway and won't let anyone move on.
> I saw the 'follow up' where one of the writers complained about getting abuse on twitter

I'm not saying it's OK to abuse people online, but if you attack someone else, you'd better be ready for some pushback.

It's a ridiculous assertion that a site founded three years ago has wandered from its roots. As for that guy's shirt, it's hardly takes a Marxist to think it's in poor taste.
Worth noting that the shirt was made for him by a female friend of his.
Poor taste? Sure. "Keeping women out of STEM fields"? Ridiculous. A vicious attack on a guy for his choice of clothing, ruining the greatest day of his life by far? Priceless.
If The Verge is "far-left", I don't want to be Right.
PC Magazine didn't have anything on Computer Shopper when you wanted to figure out the best price on a PC. Imagine over a thousand pages of newsprint, with about 850 of them being 100% ads.

It's hard to grep a dead tree, of course.

The best thing was that Computer Shopper could afford to print decent articles -- Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on the first PC UNIXen, cool things to do by writing PostScript to your printer -- after PC Magazine started thinking that those things were too geeky for their business-focused audience. (Six word-processors under $1495 compared!)

I regret throwing out my old Computer Shopper magazines. Their form factor was sub-optimal for long term storage, but they would be a ton of fun to look through today.

Edit:

Looks like there are a few issues (from the 2000-2002 timeframe) at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper

I'd love to see some early to mid-90's issues.

I found one! Computer Shopper, December 1997: "Holiday Hit! $2,499 - fully loaded 300 MHz Pentium II"

Also two J&R catalogs, winter 1998 and the orher's undated. And an OS/2 Warp Demonstration Disk 3 1/2" floppy, and various other floppies, 5 1/4" included.

Edit: ah, I was going to take the CS to the Internet Archive to scan, but the size might be a problem for their scanners. Thoughts?

I think I'll dig around my parents' and see if I can spot any issues.
I really miss the giant newsprint-digest format of the 80's and 90's. I have fond memories of Computer Shopper, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Shonen Jump. The first electronics project I ever did (with help) was from an article in Computer Shopper on controlling an RC car via parallel port and LPT instructions.
These days we consider John C. Dvorak to be a safely ignorable douchebag, like Glenn Beck. But back when PC Mag was a thing, a 200+-page tome that came in the mail each and every month, his wry and humorous industry commentary was something of a respite from the dry, business-focused news we expected from much of the PC journalism industry.
I remember reading the writing about parts of what I now call the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, particularly the "Microsoft Munchkins" part.
I've adopted a similar tradition and I think I have that same issue of PC Magazine in my old room at my parent's house. The majority of old magazines I have are old video game magazines, specifically CGW.

This practice has prompted me to go back to issues of CGW that pre-dated me (the earliest CGW I have is from 93) in the archives (http://www.cgwmuseum.org/). It's cool to see the juxtaposition of classic, influential hits with games that had good ideas or themes (often themes that have yet to be revisited) but poor implementations along with forgotten clones that don't really stand out.

The game developer magazine archives (http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag) are equally good for getting an overview of this history of game development. Early issues are hardcore technical issues about low level things we now take for granted. Later issues focus largely on diversity, political and community issues in the game industry with the occasional high level technical article.

I have a complete set of PC Mag going back to the late 80's. I was thinking about scanning them in, but Google beat me to it.

I do have a lot of other computer mags scanned in. I should probably see about getting permission to make them available online. I have a soft spot for Creative Computing from the mid 1970's. :-)

It's really interesting to explore the past like this. We often forget where we have been and who we were. It's easy to remember the time when 1024x768 and 256 colors was "workstation grade graphics" and 8 megabytes of RAM were only found on expensive RISC machines, but it's not so easy to remember how we did things and how we accomplished our goals with that kind of tool.

I remember my joy when I discovered my college had (in the mid-80's) a fairly complete collection of IEEE's Computer, Software, Communications of the ACM and BYTE. I spent countless hours diving into the past, understanding how we got where we were. That knowledge, not only of what is, but of why and how, is incredibly valuable.

Back in 1999 I finally decided to toss my pile of PC Magazine and Computer Shopper issues. It felt like I was throwing away part of my soul. To this day I still have some regret over that decision.
PC magazine was instrumental to my career in tech. I loved when a new one arrived and would read every page. It taught me so much about IT at the age of 12 that I never would have learned if I just played with computers. I even got something printed in Abort, Retry, Fail once and wore the t-shirt I got in return with pride for many years. This post does a good job of capturing the optimism that was embedded in a every issue (except Dvorak's columns). I miss that feeling.
Young whippersnappers! My first PC didn't have a hard disk, and my second was an IBM XT with 10 megs, only 4 of which were usable.

I learned to program on punch cards, standing in line to feed them into a system that occupied a large room and was probably fairly state-of-the-art for 1973.

And when I say that I exclude the one Basic program I wrote even earlier on paper tape.

At least this machine was at UCLA, so I won't say that to get to the computer I had to walk barefoot in the snow, uphill in both directions ...

And I actually wrote a machine code which I entered bit by bit with the switches over the front panel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel

For me it is Compute!'s Gazette from 1986 to 1990 that brings out the computer nostalgia. Taught me how to code in BASIC and 6502 Assembly on my Commodore 64. Still go back and read it in PDF format every now and then.
I remember typing programs from Compute! into our C64 while my dad waited semi-patiently for me to finish and demo the results, so he could get back to watching TV (never owned a monitor so had to use the family TV, was years before I got a disk drive.) I fondly recall these times.
I'm as nostalgic as anyone about that era and greatly enjoyed the article, but the thing that really stood out to me was the mystery of why his mom doesn't just tell him, "you want to keep all this stuff that's taking up space in my house? Great, take it home with you and I won't throw it away!" This might make me a bad person, but in this case I'm totally OK with that designation.
I remember getting a 486 DX4/100 right around then! It was a crazy upgrade from my previous Intel box (a 386SX-16).

I installed Slackware on it.. This was right around 1.0 kernel, I think.

You can browse a lot of these old issues with Google Books