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Does Computer Journalism Have a History?

Posted by Cliff on from the following-the-paper-and-bit-trail dept.

apanishev asks: "Hi to all /.'ters! I'm a beginner computer journalist in a Russian on- and offline magazine "PL-komp'yutery". One of the recent topics of my interest is: whether the computer journalism itself has a history? Sure it does, but my first investigations revealed nothing. I know there were some Amiga paper magazines and some BBS electronic bulletines before the Internet age, but what was the very first paper (and/or online) magazine about personal computers? About web design and professional computing? About PC games? I would be very grateful for any thoughts about the subject."

4 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. US Magazines... by Howie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Doctor Dobb's Journal (Doctor Dobbs' Journal of Computer Callisthenics and
    Orthodontics     at the time) and Byte were both around at least from the mid-70's. DDJ's website says 1976 for them. This site says Sepember 1975 for Byte.

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    "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
    1. Re:US Magazines... by Howie · · Score: 2

      Looking further through that same site, shows the People's Computer Company releasing their first magazine in October 1972. They were one of the first groups promoting personal computing, so that may well be the first 'personal computing' publication (The phrase 'personal computer' apparently first appears in print in the May 1976 issue of Byte (it says here)).

      --
      "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
  2. That's a stupid question by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 3, Informative
    Everything has a history, of course. :) I've done a good amount of online history-seeking, and I've found that the usual places of searching (like Google are the best--at least to find other subject-specialized sites.

    For some of these, there's always Yahoo!, which seems to have a good number of links in this directory.

    Also the Online History of Computers seems alright.

    If you're willing to spend a few bucks, you might invest in some of the titles in the IEEE Bibliography. LoL.

  3. Real Computers by Detritus · · Score: 2

    Computerworld and Datamation are two commercial publications that have been around for a very long time. Their primary emphasis was on large IBM systems (360/370 series), which was the majority of the computer market for many years..

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