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Farewell American Computer Magazines

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130 pointskeiferski100 comments

My dad subscribed to one of the hobbyist computer magazines back in the 70s and 80s, I think it was Creative Computing. One summer, they printed out the BASIC source code of Colossal Cave, I don't remember which platform though. Probably a PET or a TI-99.

Our whole family took turns typing in the source code on our IBM PC XT, it took us a couple of weeks in our spare time, and with no one knowing how to type besides mom and dad. Dad showed me how to make the necessary tweaks to get it to run on our flavor of BASIC, and then we played it all summer.

I definitely felt something click into place, after that experience. I ended up doing the same thing years later on my Commodore 64, manually typing in the assembly code that they printed out in Compute!, so that I could play various homegrown games. You could subscribe to the magazine and get all the monthly featured programs on floppy disk, but that was for Rich People, not peasants like us.

You talk about mind-numbing... A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A! for pages and pages and pages.

My parents bought me an early Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1982 and I spent untold days typing in source code from Compute!'s Gazette which was the Commodore-dedicated companion to Compute!.

Their MLX system for entering assembly language programs with a checksum was an amazing way to enter programs from a magazine. I remember enlisting my sister to help me type in the programs and I told her, "Type the line of numbers here. If you type one wrong, it will tell you." She quickly retorted, "If it know what's write, why doesn't the computer type it in!?"

You talk about mind-numbing... A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A

Apparently I did that too much because I can convert that to 6502 Assembly language in my head.

Yes! Compute!'s Gazette, that was it! Every month users would submit their homegrown works, like "I made a game that can display 16 sprites at once instead of 8 because of this clever IRQ trick" and it would contain the full assembly code, along with their checksum like you said. Compute!'s Gazette.

Actually got some submissions to COMPUTE!'s Gazette accepted in high school (though I also kept all my rejection letters). By then, though, they were technically COMPUTE Gazette Edition after the General Media buyout (yes, Bob "Penthouse" Guccione's outfit).

A9 = LDA, right? :)

All that remains in me' noggin...

I am not sure about that D4 6502 op code

    echo 'A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A' | mondump -r | l

    0300- A9 00     LDA #$00
    0302- C0 A0     CPY #$A0
    0304- D4        ???
    0305- 01 03     ORA ($03,X)
    0307- 05 0A     ORA $0A

using KEGS emulator with 65816 op codes

    call-151

    300:A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A

    300L

    1=m   1=x   0=d   1=LCbank (0/1)
 
    00/0300: A9 00        LDA #00
    00/0302: C0 A0        CPY #A0
    00/0304: D4 01        PEI 01
    00/0306: 03 05        ORA 05,S
    00/0308: 0A           ASL

>>> You talk about mind-numbing... A9 00 C0 A0 D4 01 03 05 0A! for pages and pages and pages.

Man, seriously, can't even think what would happen if you made a typo and how you would debug it

There was some amount of "standardization" of checksum methods to help with debugging typos. For example, Nibble magazine used a couple of programs-- the one I remember using was Key Perfect-- that would scan your program in memory after you typed it in, and report a series of short hex checksums, one for each reasonably small chunk of program (bytes for machine language, or lines of BASIC code). The magazine article would include the correct Key Perfect checksums for the program; compare against the generated report, and a difference meant you "only" had to scan a dozen lines of source instead of hundreds.

Worse, imagine going through all that, with no typos, and it still not working.

Friend and I paired up doing that once. Boy, I tell ya, you don’t have to tell us 4 times the code won’t work.

Oh, and “3rd times a charm” is a lie.

>Boy, I tell ya, you don’t have to tell us 4 times the code won’t work.

this might be the first time i've seen this, but love it

A lot of machine code listings had per-line checksums which could be checked with a small auxiliary program. PC Magazine had assembly source for its free utilities, alongside a BASIC program that would produce the utility from machine code encoded as hexadecimal numbers in DATA statements; the BASIC program also included checksums and would check the machine code as it ran.

As others have mentioned, the publishers had developed and distributed a checksum tool, written in BASIC, that you could type in from scratch as well. Although I think I copied mine from a friend who did subscribe to the monthly diskette version.

So you couldn't enter a line wrong, it would get flagged right away.

As far as debugging the whole thing, I think they just published a dump of the known-good copy they received with the user's submission. I think you had to provide two separate, working copies of your program along with the source code?

i can remember what would happen. of course, it depends on where the bug was and what it was for. i remember the bits of hex being proceeded by the DATA keyword. in one instance, the DATA was for the audio, and it played a horrendous noise. as the multiple typos that were present were fixed, the audio went from horrendous to glitchy. some of the DATA was for the graphics, and they'd present as glitches as well.

a friend of mine and i "developed" a coding technique (we were 10 years old) where i would type in the initial load (i seemed to be a better/faster hunt&peck typist). after that, we'd switch. i'd read the DATA hex, and he'd follow along on the screen and make corrections. it wasn't until many years later before i realized that the coding technique wasn't an original something that we "developed".

I got my start writing compilers from when BYTE published the complete source code to a Pascal compiler & interpreter.

Many of the old-school computer magazines are available at the Internet Archive.

Byte: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine Dr. Dobbs: https://archive.org/search?query=dr.+dobbs+journal Compute!: https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine

Nuts & Volts has archives available on their main page: https://www.nutsvolts.com/

(Archives here: https://www.nutsvolts.com/blog/archives)

I learned so much from BYTE, Creative Computing, Dr Dobbs, Nibble, UnixWorld, and so many others.

But... I still receive my print subscriptions of IEEE's Computer and Spectrum and ACM's Communications of the ACM. Always great reads in physical format.

Reading them on a tablet definitely doesn't feel the same.

DDJ and CUJ were two of favorite computer mags for a while.

Same here, since 1990 until they closed shop.

I've always found CACM to be disappointingly lightweight and low-content.

I miss developer magazines. I like and prefer the paper format.

I learned so much from Dr Dobbs.

I learned a lot from MSDN Magazine (changed names several times) Last few copies I read I was disappointed in the technical content.

I also loved Byte magazine, but it was for a more general audience. What is Pournelle up to this month?

I dont remember the correct names anymore but ZX Spectrum User or some such was also a source of great learning in programming.

I think it was Spectrum User. I also recall Your Sinclair being useful. I loved Crash, but that was games focused and mostly because I loved the cover artwork.

I also miss receiving a monthly batch of new knowledge. Websites trickle in new articles usually. There’s something about receiving that batch and having time to absorb it before the next batch arrives.

Me too. Not just the format (in hindsight, printed magazines have huge advantages that apparently can't be replicated electronically), but the content itself was so much better than most things I see online.

It was probably "ZX Computing".

I found that MSDN magazines leaned a bit too far forwards. When I needed to learn some technology, I would find it in 1-3 year old magazines. Due to constant site reorganizations, the code behind the articles might still exist, or it might have been lost to link rot.

Others you may have read could include "C Programming Journal" and "Embedded Systems Programming".

Jerry Pournelle isn't up to much anymore, as he died in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

For me, it was The Transactor when I was in high school and later the C/C++ Users Journal. I clearly remember when I felt like I was ready for the latter, after I’d been programming professionally for a few years. It must have been towards the end of that magazine’s life. It later got merged into Dr Dobb’s, I think.

A massive advantage of paper books and magazines is that you are not constantly distracted by the temptations of a multitasking OS.

and they are easier to take to the beach

And the format doesn't become unreadable due to software changes!

Though, sadly, many code snippets will be.

I started printing out again. That also helps and it is nicer to read, when sitting in the bright sun, than a screen.

Protip: get a reMarkable or similar e-ink device. Revolutionized my reading, especially for academic papers.

I have a reMarkable 2 and it is a lousy reading device, IMO. Just not enough contrast and no backlight.

I find it works great in natural light and I agree a backlight would fix the problems with low contrast … but the weeks-long battery life is nice too. Personally I find the long battery life more useful than a backlight. You can always use a reading light same as you would with printed materials.

Their website makes it pretty clear that the device is for writing, editing, note taking, and sketching. And it is meant for focus and workflow. Backlight is great for reading, but backlight increases latency and eye strain.

> A massive advantage of paper books and magazines is that you are not constantly distracted by the temptations of a multitasking OS.

I had similar problem, so I started using e-book readers(dedicated, not apps on PC), best of two worlds.

+1 to this, my Kindle and ReMarkable tablets are my favorite devices. As someone with ADHD I find them incredibly helpful for staying on-task, and I love how easy it is to get my notations from the Kindle (takes a bit more effort with the ReMarkable).

I used to subscribe to my local paper - weekly print edition for this purpose. But they stop doing print due to low circulation. I've removed news apps from my phone so I'm not constantly trying to "keep up".

My local library provide free subscriptions to weekly magazines, but also don't want to remember to open up the tablet. And paying for them aren't cheap!

As a kid I filled out a reader service card in a magazine, and said I was in charge of a $5,000,000 budget at my company. I started getting all kinds of trade magazines like InfoWorld, NetworkWolrd, eWeek, computer graphics and publishing-related ones that I can't remember the names of.

Most of it was over my head and general business news (Adobe buys Quark!) but it was fun to read about all this stuff.

i loved those types of cards as a kid. we used to use them as pranks by filling them out "for" someone unbeknownst to them. of course, that is still something i do to this day. websites that request a birthday gets january 1st of the oldest year available. haven't seen the budget option any more as i assume they know exactly who you are with all of the tracking.

tangentially, we'd send the postage paid envelopes back full of any random thing other than what the recipient would be expecting.

Dr. Dobb's Dec 1994 had an article on writing HTML. I used it as a reference to write my first homepage (remember when homepages were a thing?) in Dec. 1994 on the computer science club's server. It was my first introduction to the inner workings of the web. Fun times.

> remember when homepages were a thing?

Yup. Back around the same time, the local newspaper found my homepage and wanted to interview me about it. I waxed poetically about how the web was the ultimate enabler, bringing big and small publishers back to the same level and allowing anybody to be heard. Sounded great at the time, but I'm more and more afraid that pipe dream of my young adult self is long gone now, along with much of my hair.

> remember when homepages were a thing?

Remember? I still have mine. :)

I think the Seattle Public Library has a complete archive of BYTE magazine if you ever feel like spending a weekend typing a Lunar Lander simulator into a TI-99/4a emulator. You know, for old times sake.

OCR from a decent cellphone photo should work eh ? Unless a listing is in that dot-matrix style and the OCR software is not up to the task.

Next step should be finding a way to encode it into a tape or disk image to feed to an emulator or possibly a wav file to use with the real thing.

Yeah, but you won't learn to program from OCR.

(I credit typing in listings for about 80% of my initial learning).

Compute!'s Gazette was my "GitHub of the 80s" for my Commodore machines. It was absolutely a wild ride, typing in programs from the back to do everything from games and word processing and who knows what. IIRC, they began with BASIC, but then they essentially bootstrapped a foolproof, checksummed machine-code editor and, somewhat regrettably, cut out the source-code middleman.

The punchline is that I did not necessarily have any way of saving those programs to persistent storage, so it was just like... keep the computer turned on for a week?

Most coders learn so much from hacking on other people's code, it's an indispensable step. So typing in code is a great opportunity to experience coding, starting with a working codebase, and perhaps making your own tweaks, fixes, and enhancements. Commodore BASIC was perfect for rapid prototyping and access to sound and graphics primitives.

> then they essentially bootstrapped a foolproof, checksummed machine-code editor

I remember that I copied a short program in BASIC that you had to run in order to type in the machine code part of the main program you were typing. It would sound a bell if the checksum had no error, otherwise you would hear a buzz sound.

> and, somewhat regrettably, cut out the source-code middleman.

The programs I typed in had parts in BASIC and other in machine code. I just wish the machine code parts used the instruction mnemonics instead of the actual instruction byte code. It definitely would have been more educational to see instructions like LDA, SDA, CMP, JSR, etc instead of the actual number values.

You are correct. Grabbing a random issue of BYTE from the internet archive, and finding a listing, I get the code below. There were some minor errors I fixed, like 3 -> }. Main issue was loss of whitespace, so not good for python :-). But the whole was amazingly quick. Getting code from a print magazine from 35 years ago into editable form in a couple of minutes.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1987-04/page/n151/...

{$K-}{ turn of checking for stack overf low }

program interrupttest;

type IoProcess = *integer :

var count: integer:

var timerhandler: IoProcess;

... {definitions of NewIoProcess and IoAttach }

procedure incrementer:

begin

count:=succ (count ) :

end;

begin

timerhandler:=NewIoProcess(Ofs(incrementer).1000):

count:=0;

ioAttach ($1C, timerhondler); | attach himerhondleich" user |

while true do

timer interrupt ( 1Ch )

begin

writeln (count );

Delay (100);

{ delay 100 milliseconds}

end; end.

> although the website has suffered enough bit rot, I’m not sure any of it has survived other than, maybe, on the Wayback machine

All of the blog articles I wrote for Dr Dobbs are here:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html

Dr Dobbs was very nice to me and graciously allowed me to do this. I miss Dr Dobbs.

At some point somewhere between the late 80's and the mid '90's the entire computer magazine series of rags became little more than the video game wall to wall advertisements, including the gushing of over praise in all their "journalism articles". When they failed to offer the service they were supposed, they claimed to offer their grave was dug. It's been 30 years of nonsense nothing-but-ads computer magazines, surprised they lasted this long.

I was a Byte subscriber. The ads were part of the content as they gave me a feel of the market. From big companies to the little guys in the back pages, you could see what people were selling and how it related to the magazine's own content.

Byte's articles were rarely critical, they couldn't be or they'd risk advertisers business.

I didn't mind that much. For example when IBM introduced their Micro Channel Architecture, the "reviews" of machines such as the PS/2 Model 80 were pretty much matter of fact, explaining the technical details and with some decent photos. And this was still useful in pre-WWW times and even beyond.

That's alright. Byte's articles aimed more at connecting the state of the art, both academic and commercial, to actual problems being solved. You didn't read Byte for first-hand review of products but for insights on the computing world as a whole.

Are there quality magazines still being released about programming, even if just digitally?

I was pleasantly surprised to discover this in a local book store the other day: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/

Hey this looks great. A sub as a gift for that technically-minded kid in the household.

There are some excellent ones in German by Heise, check out https://www.heise.de/select/ There are others too, there's still a fairly healthy market for IT magazines in Germany.

They also still come as print publications. The iX magazine is focused on software development. Not affiliated in any way btw.

https://LWN.net if that counts as a magazine.

I am a subscriber. But wasn't the topic mostly about printed magazines? lwn.net has never been one.

There's a fantastic Japanese magazine called Software Design that is not only available digitally, but is still being physically printed. The magazine covers trending topics in programming, software development, and Linux systems administration. I always pick up a copy whenever I visit Japan.

https://gihyo.jp/magazine/SD

With respect to trending topics, it’s interesting to see “What is Clean Architecture” as the headline in mid-2023.

In Finland there's a delightful volunteer-driven computing culture and programming magazine called Skrolli and it's the only magazine I've subscribed to since the 1990's when paper computer magazines still held a meaningful place in the lives of people who were into computers.

The regular issues are in Finnish, of course, but they did a couple of international editions some years ago to get an idea of what's some typical content in the magazine:

https://skrolli.fi/2016.1e.illuminatus.pdf https://skrolli.fi/2017.1e.platforms.pdf

I subscribe both to German iX mentioned in a sibling comment and to Skrolli (the latter happened to be in the mail today). Unfortunately I don't read a whole lot in either of them :( I should do more camping for longer than a battery lasts.

Communications of the ACM is pretty good and does come as an actual magazine in the mail.

if you read French, Diamond Editions has a few interesting magazines https://boutique.ed-diamond.com/en-kiosque

there is also http://www.programmez.com/magazine/programmez-257-pdf

There are still a handful of Linux magazines that I see at some stores where I buy computer gear. I guess I don’t know that they’re American, but they’re sold in America, and printed in English. That seems close enough to me.

Interesting that Linux Magazine is able to survive despite the low Linux market share. I guess professional audience is much more likely to buy magazines nowadays than the noobs.

I miss Byte Magazine but not the annual PC Magazine Best Printer Edition tome.

I don't know, just the feeling of abundance you got from those inch-thick Computer Shopper issues, 90% ads ...

(And I'm the guy who thinks advertising is inherently toxic, but it damn sure is beguiling ...)

>> But how would the Beatles catalog be different if George, Paul, John, and Ringo needed day jobs? You’d imagine they might produce less and maybe even very different music.

Maybe, for pop music. And maybe music in general would be a very different affair if it wasn't such big business. In fact, in many ways it already is. See, I've always listened to metal music and I've played in a couple metal bands. Those were the typical small-time bands that are basically just a bunch of metalhead kids come together to play the music they like. And we did. With one of those bands we even had a bit of a career, playing gigs and getting people headbanging and stagediving in a venue away from home. This was in a mythical land, in a sprawling metropolis under an ancient citadel and you will never know the names of the bands that became legend, because they were local, locally grown and locally forgotten, legend. But these were good times, and they continue to be. This was music from the people, for the people. A real folk music for the 20th century, the kind of thing that big corporations will never soil with their greedy, all-withering touch.

And none of those bands were professional, and this was their strength, and what made them valuable. The value of the recognition of the big-name bands is not to be dismissed, because, ultimately, what all we kids really wanted was to be stars, ourselves, to stand on a big stage with thousands of fans at our feet, like Halford or Hetfield. But we didn't really think that would be the outcome, and still we played, and enjoyed ourselves, and made music magickal.

And still do. Have a look at the Encyclopedia Metallum. I bet 75% of the bands you'll find there have never seen a dime from their art, and they all have day jobs - day jobs that support their music. Because who cares? Just make the music you want to listen to.

Proof:

https://youtu.be/lq4dh_bAWoQ

For alt rock / indie bands half of the fun is saying oh you haven’t heard of the band x ?

One time when I was at university someone was impressed that I listened to Oh Mandy by the Spinto Band

This was one thing that I loved about metal that I always felt was missing from "pop" music - the community, and the sense of having grown organically from little roots. Guys and girls putting in the work, paying their dues, because they loved the music. And guys and girls showing up to support them, in shitty clubs and local festivals, buying the shitty merch and the shitty self-produced demo tapes.

You went because you supported the community, and you were all in it together, us long-haired weirdos. Sure, some of the bands were terrible. But you went, all the same, and you cheered for them because they were doing their best to get this turkey off the ground. And some of them were NOT terrible, and excellent times were had, and experiences were experienced, and memories were made, and by god look at this thing we did! These guys fucking rocked!

And I always felt like something was missing, when I heard pop songs on the radio. Where did Tiffany or Oingo Boingo come from? Where did they put in their dues? Did they put in their dues, at all? Who went to see them, and where? Did they all just sing in church and then went to some cattle call audition? Where was the not-quite-national pop scene, the local club acts for these kinds of music? It seemed like it arose explicitly from the board room and the accounting department, instead of growing organically like the hip hops kids and the rappers and metalheads and punks.

Having grown up during the 80s when Oingo Boingo was rocking 91x out of Tijuana, they definitely put in their dues. While a lot of the New Wave bands from the UK might have been heavily produced acts, others like the Specials and the Beat definitely spent a lot of time grinding things out.

OK, well fair enough. Maybe that wasn't a good choice for a 'pop' exemplar. I remember REM saying "No one believes we used to just be a rando Atlanta bar band". New Wave wasn't really my scene at the time. Maybe something between New Kids On The Block and Baltimora... someone you just honestly couldn't picture going to see at The Crystal Pistol.

The loss of magazines in general is a shame. I spent many magical hours perusing the back issues of Scientific American in my school library in the 60's. Some of the "Amateur Scientist" projects I built steered my career.

As a teenager, I grew up avidly reading weekly Time magazine during lunch.

I used to head down to UCSD's library when I was in grade school to read tons of their military magazines that most public libraries couldn't afford. Jane's Defence Weekly, Aviation Week etc.

They're from before my time, but I have a bunch of usergroup newsletters/small magazines from the 1970s and 1980s that are a little more specific than Dr. Dobbs and BYTE: stuff like INSUA (North Star usergroup publication), PEEK 65 (6502 and largely Ohio Scientific), and FORTH Dimension (FORTH language specific). Good stuff, not a ton of adverts. For a few of them I have the whole or very nearly whole set, and have read through them. It's somewhat sad reading through the last issues, as most of the usergroup size publications seemed to know the end was near.

2600 is still around.

In the food court, near the payphones.

We keep talking about restarting our local 2600 (paused due to coronavirus and a makerspace implosion), probably ought to.

The perfect companion for toliet time at work.

Young ones today won't know the joy of the ridiculous size of Computer Shopper 2kg (~4 pounds) of paper.

I got it for the ads, not the articles :)

I loved the ads at that time. Pure hardware porn.

Young ones today won't know the joy of the ridiculous size of Computer Shopper 2kg (~4 pounds) of paper.

True, though they will be able to experience it online -- for anyone who didn't see it, there was a very recent post on HN[0] about someone who took it upon themselves to scan 200 issues, which will be put on the Internet Archive (and I expect that gaps in the collection will likely get filled).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526

I grew up in the middle of nowhere (Yukon), so in the 1980's these magazines taught me how to program 8-bit computers. And taught me about the entire world of computing and technology in the early 1990's.

I would not be where I am today if it weren't for all that.

It's wild to think how quick we went from "exposure to tidbits of curated information at a gradual pace" to "all of human knowledge at your fingertips anywhere any time".

You can read the original article here:

https://www.technologizer.com/2023/04/15/the-end-of-computer...

Comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583853

...instead of the Hackaday summary ripoff

I really miss print. To the extent that if a press clipping service was to take the kind of blog posts and articles that appear on HN, print, bind them and ship them to me, I would sign up. There's something about being able to browse and engage with print that is superior to screens.

Now get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers!

Wistful comment on the site: https://hackaday.com/2023/06/01/farewell-american-computer-m...

"""

How many times did computer magazines predict the paperless office?

It finally caught up with them

"""

On the nose, it's been quite a few years since I've seem the "paperless office" mentioned - faded into the foreground, I guess ...

I learned a lot from Dr. Dobbs journal and Linux Journal. You could get articles at every level, beginner to advanced, and they had enough details to encourage experimentation. I had many issues saved up at one point of those two, plus Computer Shopper and Byte. No idea where they are now, either in a box somewhere or gone, sadly.

Sharing code started with the tips and tricks pages of computer magazines. In a sense the open source movement originated there.

> But how would the Beatles catalog be different if George, Paul, John, and Ringo needed day jobs?

They played professionally for years without making or selling recordings. They also made a ton of money off of touring. They became successful through radio play.

Does anyone remember when Computer Shopper reached 800 pages? In probably 1992/1993.

Nothing has ever come close to delivering the experience of reading new Dr. Dobbs Journal and Game Developer Magazine issues endlessly on the toilet.

https://juiced.gs/

Is there any online content today similar to these magazines?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com