Slashdot Mirror
Classic Computer Magazine Archive
savetz writes "I think /. readers will find this of interest: the Classic Computer Magazine Archive serves up the full text from old compter mags: three years of Creative Computing plus every issue of Antic, STart, and Hi-Res. There's also a bit of text from Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette. Everything is there with permission from the publishers."
Now I can finally type in the hex code for CrossRoads all over again. It was only 10 or so pages full of hex codes, should be fun.
Man that game was great.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
another popular computer related magazine from the past, atari age.
Oh what I wouldn't give for every issue of Electronic Games Magazine. The publication was the magazine to read from 1981-85. It offered reviews, strategy guides, and more, for arcade and home games in the golden age of video gaming. Here is a Website with all of the magazines covers, and blurbs about each issue. Today, issues of Electronic Games are coveted, and fetch a pretty decent penny on Ebay. Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
When I was young, I read every one of these publications. Learned more than I could use at the time.
Today, it is not so important to know that poke 710,0 would turn the screen background black on an Atari. Their time has passed for the most part and we could all focus our energy elsewhere today.
It is important to remember the spirit of the times though. Hacking around the guts of your machine was encouraged and reported on! New techiques covered every aspect of these machines as people used them in almost every way, but the way they were designed for!
What the Fu*k happened? People who only smell money and have no regard for others is what happened! We should be ashamed for letting them.
One interesting thing was the included source code and programming techniques. Compute used to publish games and utilities written for all the major machines at the time! Never thought about it much as a kid, just thought it was cool.
Fast forward today and what is that exactly? Open source! Not only that, but in popular publications where EVERYONE COULD SEE!
A lot could be done with this code and it made each issue worth its purchase price.
Open source preserves this spirit with todays hardware. Instead of text editors, assemblers, sprite editors we get Office Suites, C Compiliers, and OpenGL modelers.
Seriously, the technology to meet everyones basic computing needs is already done! Nobody should have to keep paying and paying for it.
Thanks for a nice reminder of exactly why I choose to use Open Tools! Somehow we need to get more people in the know. Once they do, they will never go back. Just as none of us who actually read these things did!
Blogging because I can...
Antic was crap compared to Analog. Analog always published cool programs and insightful articles, while Antic wanted to be the PC Magazine of Atari. It's a shame that medocrity is remembered so well.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
David Ahl sells insurance in New Jersey now, and wants to be left alone, unless you want to buy insurance. I have rewritten some of the better games from the two BASIC Computer Games books in Python. My versions of Eliza, Banner, and Wumpus can be found at http://cs.sru.edu/~conlon/it_workshop.html along with some other Python stuff I created.
Now this is the magazine I want to see in the archives.
I remember it from growing up; published by CTW (the same people who do Sesame Street and did 3-2-1 Contact!". Cool magazine for kids; I still have the issue where they discussed all that was wrong with "Wargames: The movie".
Each edition had sample code (BASIC or Assembler) in the back of each issue you could type in and run. Oh, and the classic ads for Popeye, Q-bert, and Lode Runner. Ah, those were the days....
(A.C., who grew up on TI-Basic and a 99/4A)
Back in the day, most of the games i played on my amiga 1000 came out of the pages of compute magazine. Ive been looking for years for old issues of compute. I'd like to obtain sources for some of thoes old games like switch box ( one of my favorites) and hex etc and port them to fbsd/ win32.
Creative Computing used to be an oustanding magazine until they changed their format to "Creative Advertising". This was about the time they stopped printing program listings. The magazine died a few years later -- kinda what happened to "The Perl Journal".
When my parents went grocery shopping I used to always get them to buy me one of those gazette mags. At that time I didn't understood what the code did, but they had that checksum program to make sure you typed it in right (usually).
There was this one game I remember that was like an RPG that was several pages long. It took forever to type it all in by chicken peck typing. When I was done I ran the checksum and it passed so I saved it all to cassette tape which ended up messing it up and the whole thing got screwed and I think that was the first time I really lost it.
There was also one program I also remember in an october issue (I think) that made this face animate into a werewolf face. When I got it running I stuck the monitor in my window for halloween.
The rest of the 80's I think I spent playing flight sims and reading the choose your own adventure type books.
Or was it Nybble ? This was an Apple II magazine that contained the complete source code for tons of cool, sometimes-commercial-level programs. Half the time the code was in BASIC, the other half of the time the code was in 6502 assembler. If you want to go blind, try entering 10-20 pages or more of straight-up hexadecimal. Ahh, the days
Old Byte mags (back when Ciarcia was writing for them) would rock, as well.
Hell, even old DDJ, back before it became the watered down dross it is today. It's still about the best left, but only because it doesn't really have competition, IMHO.
I think I have copies of both editions buried in my mother's basement, but it would be nice for it to be available on the web, if for no other reason than nostalgia.
-- $SIGNATURE
Wow, I remember Creative Computing. Was a GEM of a magazine. Heck I still have about 5 years of issues still in my parents attic.
Creative Computing and David H. Ahl got me started in computing. I remember in the late 70's Reading the magazine, typing in the basic (that didn't work right out of the magazine on a TRaSh-80) and having the time of my life making the stuff work.
The Ahl benchmarks were my favorite. I'd type them into everthing and submit the results religiously. My highpoint was when David Ahl sent me a letter thanking me for my contributions. A few years later a bad review of the PCjr killed Creative Computing and David joined one of the Atari Rags.
I made the trip to an Atari show in DC to meet him and loved listening to him. Heck my Atari ST's, portfolio's, 800's, XL's and Stacy were great toys of there era, but it really disappointed me to see my past hero, whoring for a single vendor rag.
Its really sad to hear of David as an insurance sales man. Heck he started me rolling on the Computer path, and now he's off it.
At least these sites bring up memories. Now I guess its time to go dig up my old Atari's and see if they work. Then revisit some of the programs in these journals.
Gator/Claria is Spyware.
Computer Shopper had *great* content in their black-and-white tech section, the part that more-or-less started with "The Hard Edge". Readers of that material could regularly depend on articles detailing changes in CPU architecture, memory technology, optical storage etc.
Kind of like what Tom's Hardware and anandtech do, only good.
The shopper was my guide to life while I was in high school. I managed to build enough decent PCs to afford a dual 486DX/2 machine when I went off to college, mostly financed through the fact that I could *always* find parts a few bucks cheaper if I just dug deep enough into the ads.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
When I get a hankerin' for some of that "back in the day" goodness, I find a handheld game, like Yahtzee or Battleship, for example (they help provide instant ideas and present a palatable project duration), and then sit down at my Atari 130XE and create my own version over a weekend, sometimes in a single sitting.
In an ancient world devoid of the need for multi-threading, exception handling, and lengthy design documentation, it's amazing how fast the assembly language flows from your fingertips.
It's quite a refreshing diversion, and allows me to recapture those carefree days.
I imagine that certain magazines with a strong enough community could set up a volunteer effort, but the copyright issue is tricky. Future contracts could deal with this i suppose, but I guess that doesn't help with the back issues.
If not for Creative Computing, Compute!, and books such as More Basic Computer Games I'd be pumping gas somewhere... hmm perhaps this reference should be retired. Anyway, I learned to code with my old Atari (do not bump the table while saving to tape!) 400 and these publications, and I'm lucky enough to get paid to code today.
I still have some copies of Compute from 1981 laying around here somewhere. They make for intersting reading especially with adverts such as:
48k memory upgrade board only $149
Ah, the good ole days.
I've been searching for this article, hoping that somewhere, someone had reprinted it. When this first article came out, I printed the maxims and put them on the wall next to my ST. After years of experience, I've leared that maxim 10 is wrong for my work; however, most of the sagely advice still applies today. Brief synopsis of David Small's voodoo computing:
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
What are some of my fond memories?
There is another site doing the same with german Atari magazines.
For me Dr. Dobbs Journal (running light without overbyte) was a classic. I remember reading and re-reading every single article. Every month usually had a new programming language created and implemented by hobbyists. It had a spirit of excitement and adventure that I have never seen in any other magazine, and I read every and magazine I could get my hands on: Creative Computing, BYTE, REMark, Sextant (I had an article in that one), Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and many I don't remember anymore.
Surely the issues from 1985 and earlier should be public domain ? We just need a set of copies and a bunch of people to scan them in!
On a different note, this applies to the topic as a whole. "Creative Computing" inherited that whole DIY attitude from the hippy days and things like the "Whole Earth Catalog". That whole, go ahead, give it a try, figure out how to do things yourself schtick. The whole early PC industry was hobbiest driven. Hell, that hippy Woz was giving away schematics to build your own Apple! (Of course, back in those halcyon days, all electronic devices came with a manual and a schematic so an electronics tech could repair them.)
Things certainly have changed. There's sure a lot more money floating around now, and a lot of people who don't "get it". But we still have open source and lots of wackos hacking up electronic stuff on the web, so it's not a total loss.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So what era is 1970's computer 'zines if late 80's early 90's are consider "classic". Ah... going through my dad's old Byte mags (build your own S-100 computer from schematics) and Kilobaud Microcomputing. Mom threw them all out; fergot the other periodicals of the era. Can anyone name other titles of the time ?
:(
Parents got me 2 years of Family Computing back then; the Apple ][ programs were always lame compared to C-64