Sometimes, if you wait long enough...

[krpalmer]

For a while now, I've been turning up scanned copies of decades-old computer magazine in obscure corners online. Hopefully old enough (and devoted to long-discontinued systems) that this doesn't bother too many people, a good number of these magazines do interest me and brush up my awareness of the heroic age of microcomputing. Every time I found another source of magazines, though, I would think back to one I first learned about years before, when its last year in print turned up in the basement after my family moved and a computing class early in high school had us look at a bunch of even then old magazines on a shelf just to find the computer-related cartoons in them. It had caught my interest in a particular way, and the text-only transcriptions of its final years I turned up quite a while ago might have only piqued my attention further. As kept I wondering if anyone else would get around to scanning them, though, I began thinking of the handful of issues of it I'd managed to get through online auctions. If someone had to take the first step of cutting their magazines up to scan them on, that someone might even be inexperienced me... and then, driven by some obscure feeling that had me checking the "computer magazines" section of the Internet Archive on a thoroughly regular basis, I saw a new entry there.

There have been other people with fond memories of Creative Computing, even if I've also noticed dismissive opinions of it in other old magazines. I suppose what made it feel different to me was the awareness it had been started just in advance of the famous article in Popular Electronics that introduced the Altair computer kit, intended for a readership of people in charge of minicomputers at high school computer labs and the like looking for programs in BASIC to get their students interested but also interested in the social ramifications of "computing." "Hobbyist computing" worked into it bit by bit, but a thoughtful, not obsessively technical sort of attitude seemed to stick with it until its final days, when the larger publishing firm it had come linked with along the way noticed advertising revenues down with the industry shaking itself out and shut the magazine down at the end of 1985. I do wish it had continued on for a bit longer, to see what it would have made of the Macintosh Plus, the different struggles of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, and perhaps it would even have taken a look at not just the Apple IIgs but also the Tandy Color Computer 3.

With all of that said, the PDF files on the Internet Archive are compressed to within millimetres of their lives; the text is legible but the pictures are weird and over-smooth, and they also have noticeable scan borders on all sides. There are very large uncompressed files of the page scans available too, though; the thought of "trying to make something else" of them does come to mind...

Comments

[thrush]

Thanks for posting this; there was a lot in there i didn't know about. The one thing that sometimes makes me wish I'd been born earlier is the idea of having been old enough to appreciate the early days of home microcomputing. Hardware and software both seem like they were much cooler in those days....

For what it's worth, I totally support any contributions you may choose to make to preserving these old magazines. ^_^b