I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You (2021) | Hacker News Reader

I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You (2021)

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42 pointsnaves16 comments

I fully support looking at older publications. There are a ton of great older ideas which were unjustly ignored. Or maybe they were rightly ignored at the time, but the situation has changed and now those ideas are relevant now. As an example of the latter, Koopman operator theory comes to mind, though I personally am not a fan of Koopman stuff. Koopman operator theory didn't become relevant until computers became powerful enough.

During my PhD, I did some deep literature reviews and found tons of valuable papers that were ignored. I was naive at the time. I'm sorry to say that almost no one cared, and my PhD advisor thought it was a waste of time. I get some appreciative emails every once in a while, but that's it. Many academics seem to implicitly assume that if a paper is older than X years, it's not valuable. I hope that attitude will change within my lifetime.

This is key for me, many ideas that failed first time around still have a usecase now and potentially even more so. Or they take on alternative forms but lessons learned and use cases from the past can influence how we use modern tools.

I really resonated with the link to the MacUser article on word searches.

> Word Search will generate and print the sort of word puzzles where you have to look forwards, backwards and diagonally to Find a given set of words. Even though you can only dis¬ play and solve a puzzle of 32 X 16 on your screen, larger puzzles can be created for printing. To give you an example of what can be done with the program, a set of 10 puzzles including states, mouths and composers are on the disk.

It later goes on to describe something I've personally experienced.

> And printing seems to take a while, but when others sit and fuss over your creation, you’ll say the wail was worth it.

Over the last couple of years I've been working on a side project involving mazes and also... word searches! Last Christmas I printed off a bunch of Christmas themed word searches I generated for the family to play on Christmas day. Seeing real people have real fun with something I created felt like remembering what programming was supposed to be about – bringing actual joy to people, instead of adding another forgettable feature to some product manager's roadmap.

I posted it to HN at the time, but I have a small writeup of it here. https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/year-in-review/#-wo...

I did read them. In the eighties.

Exactly. Aside from the hardware specific journals and articles, I think Byte is the magazine that had the best articles still relevant today, I still have a couple of the August issues (Threaded Interpretors and Smalltalk).

Dr. Dobbs was also good (and lasted surprisingly long dying only in 2009 in print and 2014 online).

DoesHaveManyCasesOf80sMagazinesStackedFloorToCeilingForSeveralYards == YES They're part of the alternate universe before the series of unfortunate events (MFNforDaCCP, MS-DOS, FSF, PPP/MSRAS, The Sculley, The Gould, The Cutler, That Face and InfoSys) that left us in the current dystopia: Three trillion dollar what? who?

I'm afraid even https://jonudell.net couldn't save us.

I love reading old magazines computer related or not. It really feels like a time machine when you read them, with the articles and advertisements taking you back to when they were current. And it is always interesting to read articles from 40 years ago that debate the merits of portable virtual machines (the p-system back then) versus native code that aren't very different from the same debates today.

Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002

I read 80s Japanese videogame/PC mags (look at the pictures, look for words I recognise, occasionally use machine translation)

https://archive.is/Urt0h

They don’t have paywalls, so there’s that.

They also tend to be better written and edited than tech writing in recent decades - and I'm not even talking about the rise of AI slop and search engine bait in recent years. When tech publications entered the hybrid era where every article was dual purpose for both the print magazine and the web site, things started to change, usually for the worse.

As a startup founder back then I got to know a lot of the editors, staff writers and regular columnists at many of the bigger magazines because I'd meet with them regularly during trade shows and editorial visits and sometimes hang out after hours. Outside of a few exceptions like Byte, very early computer pubs were mostly zines written by computer enthusiasts. Due to the success of those early leaders a real publishing industry emerged which attracted writers with journalism degrees (or at least serious writing skills) who also loved tech. A surprising number of them were really insightful about tech trends and where the industry was going. I learned stuff and gained useful perspective that helped me be a better startup guy. While industry scuttlebutt and first-hand stories of Gates, Jobs and Grove could be interesting, I also picked up more subtly valuable things like ways of thinking through evolving tech trends and emerging market analysis.

I got the feeling some of them understood we were living through a revolutionary period that would be historically Important. By the mid and late 90s the tech publishing industry was finally losing the last vestiges of the computer enthusiast era and becoming an IT focused 'Big Industry'. The major magazines were being bought and rolled into New Media conglomerates like IDG and Ziff Davis. Articles were re-imagined as "Content" able to attract page views and ad clicks with web-inflated valuations. At one 90s Comdex, IDG threw a massive party that occupied an entire 15,000 seat sports arena and the top of the arena was lined with 90 six-foot tall blow-ups of magazine covers - one from each of IDG's 90+ IDG tech magazines around the world. The Temptations (I think) performed live and during a break, the founder of IDG was presented with a white stallion horse on stage. I was sitting with an IDG group publisher I'd known since he was the lowly publisher of a pre-IDG backwater magazine. As the white stallion exited the stage, he leaned over to me and whispered "Remember this moment... because it has to be the peak." And he was right. I also fondly recall several 90s Comdex dinners in Vegas with John Dvorak (PC Magazine's long-time top columnist) which often turned into all-night bar crawls. Great guy, good times.

Well played!

(2021)

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