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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.
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
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
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.
What are some of my fond memories?