Better Late Than Never (and maybe than sooner too)

[krpalmer]

A while ago, I enthused that copies of Creative Computing magazine had been added to the Internet Archive's repository of old computer magazines but did add the quality of the PDFs wasn't that great. Something was better than nothing, though, perhaps pointed out by one gap in the bimonthly issues from 1978. Today, though, I took a look at the general archive page just to see what might be there and saw, only a few weeks old, the missing March/April 1978 issue listed. The second surprise was when I downloaded the PDF file and saw it was of higher quality than all the Creative Computing ones before it. As for the actual content, this issue did have an April Fool's parody of another contemporary computer magazine I could see as a dress rehearsal for the larger parody on the flip side of the April 1980 issue. There was still a curious sense to it of preceding the era of "turn-key systems," with an article examining the original TRS-80 in the issue before it and the article covering its "Level I" manual pushed to the issue after it, but maybe that ties into its being an "outlier."