A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s

A Few Good Magazines from the 70s and 80s

Youngsters may find it hard to imagine, and us oldsters may find it hard to remember, but in the late 1970s through most of the 1980s, there were several very good magazines being published. This is a personal remembrance of periodicals I knew and loved. Not all of them are explicitly "tech" magazines, but each of them expressed an optimism for technology and the future.

It's not all tech in this list, but we're definitely starting with tech. BYTE was by far my favorite. It was already going strong by the time my family got our first TRS-80 for the home.

When my mom brought home a Sun workstation running Smalltalk, the famous August '81 Smalltalk Balloon issue had just been published.

BYTE was focused on the (then) growing Micro-Computer Revolution. Early issues bounced between hardware projects (like how to build a cassette interface or graphics card to your S-100 system) and software projects (like "Roll Your Own Assembler.") The early years of BYTE predated the IBM PC by years.

I first encountered Steve Ciarcia in the pages of BYTE, where his monthly Circuit Cellar articles tackled an interesting DIY hardware project. Circuit Cellar eventually spun off as it's own thing and if the internet is to be believed, Steve sold his interest in the business in 2016, hopefully to enjoy a happy retirement.

In addition to countless articles about new personal computing systems and industry news, BYTE also ran annual articles focused on specific programming languages. The August '77 issue focused on APL and the August '79 issue was a deep-dive on LISP.

BYTE is still worth reading, 50 years later. Maybe not every article, but there are some great overviews of topics that are still of interest (programming languages, games, music, etc.) And if you're a computer historian, it's a first class collection of primary sources. Many of the articles were written by the great minds of the time (Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, Seymour Papert, etc.)

And for about a decade, Robert Tinney provided cover illustrations for the magazine. Each was interesting, topical and well executed. It's worth the few minutes it takes to peruse his website at tinney.net.

Before Server Fault and Stack Overflow reduced programming to a cargo-cult religion of copy and paste, professional software engineers needed to understand what they were doing. There was no AI you could nudge to mine the intellect of past generations of coders. Titles like "Programmer / Analyst" and "Software Engineer" implied an understanding of technical and business processes. Professionals like this read Dr. Dobbs.

Dr. Dobbs started as a modest affair in the mid-70s by Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison focused on Tiny BASIC for microcomputers. The first time I encountered it at the Byte Shop on North Collins in Arlington, Texas, it was still a photocopy of a modestly typeset newsletter.

By the mid-80s, however, it had grown to a professionally produced resource for software professionals. Most every CASE tool I encountered, I read about in Dr. Dobbs first.

By the time the 90s rolled around, Dr. Dobbs seemed tightly focused on C/C++, but in the 80s there were still articles on FORTH, Modula-2, 6502 Hacks and so forth. The February '87 Issue has an interesting historical take on the concept of "Artificial Intelligence." Once upon a time, the term encompassed a wide variety of tools and techniques. It was not synonymous with LLM/CNN/Back-Propigation.

COMPUTE! and Creative Computing were also popular among my peer group at the time. My sense was they attracted more of a hobbyist or power-user demographic: People who weren't working as software engineers, but had bought a Commodore 64 because they wanted to learn more about what personal computers could do. It's hard to remember, but there was a time when few people had a personal computer (much less a mobile phone.) There was a general sense that "the future" was coming and people who knew how to plug in a Commodore 64 had a better chance of not getting bull-dozered by it.

Personal Computing magazine seemed to be targeting a broad audience. It contained articles on spread-sheet programs, games, math and taxes. But maybe the most important thing to remember here is they were using the term Personal Computing long before the IBM PC was even a notion in Don Estridge's heart.

One thing you would find in Personal Computing, COMPUTE!, Creative Computing and BYTE were listings. Beautiful, beautiful BASIC listings, ready to be typed in. This was before public access to the internet. Even modems were somewhat rare. Floppy disks cost at least a dollar and cost of duplicating magnetic media to distribute along with a print magazine was still pretty prohibitive.

If you were a kid in the late 70s with a TI 99/4 or a TRS-80, print magazines were how you got your software. And maybe more importantly, it's how you learned BASIC programming.

Most of us who learned programming in the 70s and 80s didn't learn it as a rigorous discipline. We learned by imitation and experimentation. We typed in a program and made a guess at what would happen if we changed it and then monkeyed with the code until it did something similar to what we wanted.

Not much has changed in terms of coding pedagogy. Though I guess we now look at python scripts and code fragments on GitHub and Stack Overflow instead of BASIC programs printed in magazines.

Before moving on, I just wanted to mention. One thing I loved about this era was how little infrastructure was required. You didn't need mobile phone service or an account with an ISP. A library card and an Atari 800 was all you needed to participate in the future.

I miss those days.

Playboy Magazine in the 50s and 60s had a reputation for, among other things, reviewing hi-fi systems, pop albums and surprisingly good fiction. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione must have wanted some of the tech + fiction market because he and his wife Kathy Keeton launched Omni Magazine in 1978.

Omni was sensuous. Omni was fun. Omni seemed scientific and smart. Omni seemed like they had a better view of the future than most of the rest of us.

Omni wasn't so much about naked women. That was Bob Guccione's other magazine. There was nothing overtly pornographic about it, but it may have been one of the best designed magazines of the decade.

Hacker News commenter @IAmBroom described Omni as "hands-down the sexiest thing Penthouse ever did with their money." Truer words were never spoken. Sometimes the brain is the sexiest organ in the body.

Omni frequently published articles about UFOs, orbital colonies and Kirlian photography. But they also published interviews with respected scientists (Freeman Dyson was interviewed in their inaugural issue.) Every issue I remember had a photo feature often focusing on some aspect of the natural world. And sci-fi by some of the genre's greats.

Omni smelled like the future and looked like a million bucks. You can find copies of a few issues up on the Internet Archive. It's worth the time to page through them.