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PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld's Origins, as Told by David Bunnell (technologizer.com)
19 points by taylorbuley on Jan 26, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


Sorta off-topic but...

This is part of that window in time and place that isn't Internet history but isn't the part of the early Web on either. BBSs/PC culture, minicomputers, and various other things exist as sort of a memory hole about which there is relatively extant documentation outside of some memories that may not have been written down at some point. Some things from that era, anything related to Apple, big companies that survived (IBM, HP) made it through to the present day but much did not.


Plenty of web stuff gets lost to the sands of time.


Plenty of everything gets lost to the sands of time--some fortuitously--but there are segments in a given era that got lost far more.


Fascinating article/account. A couple of light bits:

> IDG didn’t have any money for Macworld, but they apparently had plenty of money for 80 Micro, which was a magazine for the Radio Shack computer. I had to admit, Steve had a point

Sorry Steve, IDG knows who's going to win this race, and it isn't Apple.

> “Sure, laptops are really the wave of the future. I hear this machine of Steve’s is a real loser.”

Half right at least. And Radio Shack's laptop has been featured multiple times on HN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

>> According to Gates, "part of my nostalgia about this machine is this was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code in the product"


is there any place on the web where one can peruse PC Magazine issues from the 90s? I was looking for one last night and couldn't find anything like it.



Wonderful! Thanks a lot for the link! Oh man, reading that end of year 1994 issue brings out a lot of memories. An IBM Thinkpad 755CD cost $7600 USD!!! and those advertisements for everything else: the design language, the words, the double entendre, those were the times.


These are freely available via Google Books, and also searchable: https://books.google.com/books/about/PC_Mag.html?id=w_OhaFDe...


Some are. Per my other comment, pretty incomplete--though welcome even as such.


I counted 215 issues online for the 90s decade. What is missing?


So as a weekly...

Not a criticism, but most of these sources are not comprehensive.

[I'm wrong in the case of PC Mag.]


"PC Magazine uses Google Books as the official archive of its 27 years as a print publication."

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/PCMag#Early_transition_to_square...


PC Mag was never weekly. Its all there.


My bad. I remembered it as a weekly.

Still, many of the mags of the era are still incompletely archived if at all.


Per other comment, there are a fair number of computer magazine issues from that era on the Internet Archive. But it's mostly very incomplete if you're looking for something specific.




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