old magazines

From: Tony Dellett <workapulo_at_my-dejanews.com>
Date: Mon Aug 31 14:09:16 1998

I'd be very interested to know if you have copys of an old magazine called "Micro Cornucopia". I did a summer internship there when I was in high school.

Tony

--
On Mon, 31 Aug 1998 12:04:26   Seth J. Morabito wrote:
>[...]
>> When did the downward trend in magazines occur, or was it a steady 
>> process? 
>
>Old computer magazines are another passion of mine.  I a large
>bookshelf full of BYTE magazine, from around 1976 to 1993, and
>leafing through these magazines is like looking through the layers
>of sediment in an archeological search.  It's immensely fascinating.
>
>BYTE started out as a single-signature stapled magazine.  The September
>1975 issue is 96 pages.  These were the days of serious homebrew
>systems, and Byte catered to that crowd exclusively. There were articles
>about writing assemblers, about microcode, about CPU design, about MMU
>architectures, and about CP/M internals.  The typical reader was putting
>together a home-made or kit-bought S100 machine, and wanted to stay in
>touch with their fellow hackers.  Those were truly glory days, 1975 to
>1980, although I was too young to participate.  I was busy playing in
>a stream somewhere over summer vacation :) [I guess I'm trying to make
>up for lost time by being so interested in classic computers now]
>
>BYTE stayed about this size, right up through 1980 or so.  If you were
>around to remember it, there was a HUGE burst in Home Computing mania
>right around 1981.  Computers were suddenly everyhere, and everyone seemed
>to have access to an Apple II or a Sinclair or (later) a Commodore 64.
>With the introduction of the IBM PC, computers gained "business"
>acceptance, and the wave crested.  Anyone remember the 1982 TIME Magazine
>"Man of the Year" going to "The Computer"?  That raised a few eyebrows.
>
>It was right around that time that BYTE swelled into a behemoth 400-page
>magazine.  It was like hefting a book, and the spine was a good 3/4"
>thick.  Every article had something good in it.  There were in-depth
>articles about Smalltalk and the coming of Object Oriented Programming.
>Serious reviews of new commercial computer products.  Buyer's guides.
>And still, plenty of technical articles, and source code for programs.
>
>It wasn't until 1985 or so that BYTE got back down to smaller proportions,
>and had fewer articles.  They focused more PC clones, the brand-new
>Macintosh, business applications; less on hard-core internals.  The techie
>articles were still there, just in fewer numbers, and the readership
>of Byte was pretty mixed, technical and business computer users.
>Computer literacy was still not what it is today, so there weren't as
>many clueless newbies.  There would be plenty of time for that later.
>
>In my very humble opinion, it was around 1987 or 1988 that computer
>magazines started seriously heading downhill.  BYTE remained a very good
>magazine, right up through 1993, but after that, it was fully devoured by
>"Business App-Itis", and became pretty un-interesting.
>
>These days, the only computer magazine that's anything like what
>Byte used to be is "The Computer Journal", published by Dave Baldwin.
>Unfortunately, it's quarterly instead of monthly -- there's just not
>that much demand for S100 information these days :)
>
>-Seth
>-- 
>"It looks just like a Telefunken U47!              Seth J. Morabito
> You'll love it."  - Frank Zappa                  sethm_at_loomcom.com
>
-----== Sent via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/  Easy access to 50,000+ discussion forums

Received on Mon Aug 31 1998 - 14:09:16 BST