An End and an Unexpected Beginning
Aug. 27th, 2015 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerToday I read through the last of the PDFs of Softalk magazine. They had been pretty interesting, a bit different from the other computer magazines of the early 1980s anyway with their "here's what famous and/or interesting people are doing with their Apple computers" human-interest articles (even if there were occasional letters complaining those pages could have been used for the usual articles about what to do with their computers themselves) mixed in with the regular columns on more technical topics. I wound up a bit readier to understand why the sudden disappearance of the magazine (and its associated titles) had seemed like "the end of the golden age" to those who'd been reading it.
In an unrelated development, I also went back to the Internet Archive's collection of Creative Computing magazines, and was surprised to see some new titles in that archive, even if they'd been there for a few months already. The first three years of that magazine hadn't been available there (although the volumes that had reprinted most of the articles from them can be found elsewhere), but now some of the earliest magazines were available, including the very first, now more than forty years old and a few months older than the cover story of Popular Electronics that introduced the Altair 8800, back when the slim, printed-on-newsprint issue was meant for educators using minicomputers in high school or thereabouts classrooms. I might yet do better moving on to something a bit more different for now, but what I saw was interesting to see anyway.
In an unrelated development, I also went back to the Internet Archive's collection of Creative Computing magazines, and was surprised to see some new titles in that archive, even if they'd been there for a few months already. The first three years of that magazine hadn't been available there (although the volumes that had reprinted most of the articles from them can be found elsewhere), but now some of the earliest magazines were available, including the very first, now more than forty years old and a few months older than the cover story of Popular Electronics that introduced the Altair 8800, back when the slim, printed-on-newsprint issue was meant for educators using minicomputers in high school or thereabouts classrooms. I might yet do better moving on to something a bit more different for now, but what I saw was interesting to see anyway.