Vanished Then and Now
Apr. 16th, 2023 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerKeeping one eye on what computer magazine covers are emerging from the queue of my side-project Tumblr, I spotted the final issue of BYTE show up. Aware of the magazine’s significance to other people, I pondered trying to build a post about that here. Looking back, though, I had the impression I’d put down pretty much everything I could say about BYTE myself when prompted by its “twentieth anniversary cover.”
The next day, though, I got pointed to comments about “the last American computer magazines in print are going out of print,” and the resonance between a loss back then and a loss now did have an unfortunate novelty. I am aware I would simply glance at the covers of MacLife on newsstands and reflect on how I’d just let my subscription lapse over a decade ago. I hadn’t been reading the copies I’d been getting in the mail, but that was a specific matter of being stuck cringing at the thought of running into still more of the “anti-Phantom Menace comments” that had started being thrown into issues of MacAddict starting around 1999 or so, regardless of a change in title, format, and just perhaps attitude. “Not having felt the same visceral revulsion at ‘lame comedy relief’” as plugged-in commentators, or perhaps just having made the effort not to, has had an unfortunate amount of effects on me. I’m at least aware of magazines being “time capsules ready to hand” the way web sites aren’t for all that sometimes I dwell just a little much on the thought “what would, or might, Creative Computing have said about developments in computing in 1986 alone?”
The next day, though, I got pointed to comments about “the last American computer magazines in print are going out of print,” and the resonance between a loss back then and a loss now did have an unfortunate novelty. I am aware I would simply glance at the covers of MacLife on newsstands and reflect on how I’d just let my subscription lapse over a decade ago. I hadn’t been reading the copies I’d been getting in the mail, but that was a specific matter of being stuck cringing at the thought of running into still more of the “anti-Phantom Menace comments” that had started being thrown into issues of MacAddict starting around 1999 or so, regardless of a change in title, format, and just perhaps attitude. “Not having felt the same visceral revulsion at ‘lame comedy relief’” as plugged-in commentators, or perhaps just having made the effort not to, has had an unfortunate amount of effects on me. I’m at least aware of magazines being “time capsules ready to hand” the way web sites aren’t for all that sometimes I dwell just a little much on the thought “what would, or might, Creative Computing have said about developments in computing in 1986 alone?”