A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s | Hacker News Reader

A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s

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79 pointsOhMeadhbh30 comments

Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia was my goto, I boot strapped my first C compiler from Ron Cain's Small-C code.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C

* https://github.com/trcwm/smallc_v1

I remember feeling like a professional my first time reading an issue Dr. Dobb's I got at an airport on the '90s.

My first article was published in Dr Dobb’s in 1992!

DDJ and Creative Computing were by far my favorite computer magazines that I looked forward to every month.

The DDJ editor Ray Valdez was kind enough to (without me even asking) grant me keep the copyright to the article about pie menus that I wrote for the Dec 1991 UI issue.

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing.

Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616247

The death of Byte magazine cover artist Robert Tinney, was discussed here just a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987425

Kilobaud Computing had died out.

Byte and Dr Drobbs had the odd technical article but gone mostly mainstream by the 80s.

But one of my classmates showed me an issue of Hardcore Computist (renamed Computist) and I was hooked.

Technical knowledge about circumventing copy-protected software interspersed with cracks for various software programs.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computist

back issues on archive.org at https://archive.org/search?query=Hardcore+Computist

I thought of OMNI before anything and was pleased to find it on the article :-)

Yeah. It was randomly happening upon OMNI on the Internet Archive that inspired the article. What a delightful magazine!

Exact same experience here.

That was a favorite of mine hands down. Anyone have suggestions on where to access all/most issues?

Short answer: probably not. Discussion from almost ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14472265

There is the Internet Archive, but the scans aren’t great:

https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/Best_of_OMNI_1_1980...

No idea if this is the case anymore, but many NY Public Libraries had "Stacks" where they kept lots of magazines going back to the 1970s. I havent checked for at least a decade, but that was a lot of fun -- we'd go there and look at old computer ads from the 1980s. They would have a binder per decade -- giant thick binders.

If you're willing to put up with the hassle, you could find them on Microfiche for sure. I've found newspapers from the 1700s in NYPL's microfiche archives https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/general-research-divisi...

All those HR Giger artworks, yes, Omni had style

DDJ was my favorite of those mentioned. Byte was #2. The rest were a pass for me. After DDJ called it quits, they released a CDR containing an archive of all issues, which I still have. Much of the content was timeless.

There was a Toronto Commodore magazine called The Transactor that was my absolute favourite. It covered everything from the CBM 4032 and 8032 through the various Amigas. The magazine was very much programmer oriented, from assembly to BASIC and C.

It also published the Commodore Inner Space Anthology, containing full memory maps, ASCII tables, BASIC reference, and much, much more.

https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-gallery/the-transactor-ma...

Earlier on, when I was first using our VIC-20 and C64, I learned a great deal from Compute and Compute's Gazette.

NICE!

I was surprised to -not- see The_Transactor, which was full of details on how to get your C64 to boldly go where no BASIC type-ins had gone before.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120519135652/http://www.bombja...

I grew up in Texas. I don't think I saw a copy of the Transactor when I was a kid. Or maybe I did and it just didn't register.

And don't take this the wrong way... this is more of a personal remembrance of times past. I'm not throwing shade by not including specific publications. I would love to read a blurb about your memories about the Transactor.

I'm sort of realizing BYTE and Omni were "totems" of my friends group. We knew someone was in our "in group" when we saw them reading them. There's probably a decent master's thesis here for Anthropology grad students.

Shout out to Phrack Magazine.

https://phrack.org/

The article states that "Playboy" magazine creators started "Omni", but I'm almost certain it was "Penthouse".

I would describe both Playboy and Penthouse as primarily pornography. As such, they were both wildly popular in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Omni was not that. I had a subscription to Omni from the first issue in 1978 until about 1983. Pop science, science fiction, fantasy art, interviews and features on space exploration policy... and junk science, UFOs, psychic powers, cults. News of the wierd.

> Playboy Magazine in the 50s and 60s had a reputation for, among other things, reviewing hi-fi systems, pop albums and surprisingly good fiction. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione must have wanted some of the tech + fiction market because he and his wife Kathy Keeton launched Omni Magazine in 1978.

Either that got ninja-edited in the 8 minutes since you posted that comment, or you misread that paragraph.

As expected, I misread the paragraph.

Well, agreed that people didn't really buy Playboy or Penthouse for the articles. But it was pretty tame compared to PornHub and other online porn of today. You'd see breasts, maybe some pubic hair, but not much more, particulary in Playboy. Hustler was more explicit but none of them showed actual sex; you'd have to go to an "adult" bookstore or theater to find that.

I did. The only Playboy magazine I ever bought contained an interview with Steve Jobs. Unfortunately I lent it to a friend and never got it back.

I had something similar. A friend of mine gave me an issue because it had a Borges story in it. I mean, I looked at the centerfold, but mostly paid attention to the story.

I am surprised at no mention of 2600. Kilobaud would be the other magazine from that time I read voraciously (along with all the computer ones mentioned).

I was under a court order not to have "criminal hacking materials" in my house or dorm room. Besides, there wasn't that much decent info in it. At least in the early days.

I still have that Byte August 1981 issue in my office. I may have the Forth issue as well.

Bonus points if you have a copy of Loeliger's "Threaded Interpretive Languages" as well as the FORTH issue.

Another magazine I think they should have mentioned: "Radio-Electronics".

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