If you weren't a part of it, you might be surprised to know the role played by the first computer magazines in driving the "computer revolution" that transformed the world.

When you buy a computer today, within minutes of turning it on you can be doing something productive, or at least fun.  Kids are using computers as soon as their chubby little digits can push a button.  Computer use is so ubiquitous and thoroughly disseminated through our culture as to be instinctual.  It's an integral part of every school curriculum.  It's part of everyday life. 

Now turn the clock back.  A computer user in 1982, the year the COMPUTE! magazine on the left was published, was basically on his own.  Computer makers like Commodore, Atari, and Texas Instruments had just begun selling their machines in retail stores.  Software was of wildly inconsistent quality, mostly awful, some of it still being sold on cassette tapes 'packaged' in zip-lock plastic bags.  Salesmen at these places knew absolutely nothing about computers, of course.  In my neck of the woods, computers weren't yet in schools.  My high school had an Apple II and a TRS-80, both locked away mysteriously in closets, lest they wake from their blinking lethargy and overthrow us.  It's hard to believe, in these enlightened times, that many educators once believed computers were useless at best, and downright harmful at worst.  Compounding all this was the unavoidable truth that computers then couldn't really do anything without herculean intervention on the part of the user.  The computer printed READY on the screen, made a cursor blink on and off, and then waited smugly for further instructions. Blink, blink, blink.

Computer magazines provided us the support cruelly denied by society at large, along with real, useable software in the form of type-in program listings.  They enthusiastically kept our spirits up by preaching of the imminent Revolution-- the day everyone would be using computers.  And they gave us something to do with our computers until the Revolution got here.

Magazines gave early computer users "expert advice" in an era when there really weren't any experts.  How does a disk drive work?  Do you need a cassette recorder?  We were all learning together.

Note the "EXPAND-O-RAM" for the VIC-20 in the ad.  $119.00 for 16K of computer RAM.  If memory was still selling at that price today, adding 1GB of RAM to your PC would cost almost 8 million dollars!

Computer magazines are where we did our shopping.  Most computer products could only be purchased through mail-order in those days, so magazines were vitally important if only for the advertisements.  There was always risk -- a printer or disk drive was a huge investment, often costing far more than the computer itself.  Ads in magazines often provided an incredible amount of information, and the articles and user reviews were invaluable.

Here's the ad that convinced me to buy the first real printer I ever owned.  I'll wager that I read that page a thousand times, drooling over such features as "true descenders," "bi-directional printing," and "Near-Letter-Quality Mode."  A fantastic bargain too, believe it or not, at $259.95

Type-in program listings were what sold the magazines.  A few hours of tedious typing, and then a few days (or weeks) of laboriously correcting all the mistakes you made, and you would have a complete, useable piece of software for the price of a magazine.  The quality of the software was often at least as good as what could be bought commercially.

The listings were usually for game programs.  After all, computer magazine readership was primarily made up of teenage boys.  But there were also useful tools and applications in just about every issue.  In fact, Speedscript, published by COMPUTE! magazine, was probably the most popular word processor ever made for the Commodore 64.  The listing for that one was page after page after page, a friend and I took turns for days typing it all in.

So whatever happened to these great magazines? 

Well, remember the Computer Revolution they kept promising was right around the corner?  It arrived. 

As computers became more and more user friendly, with better and better software right out of the box, users no longer needed to also be programmers.  They could finally be users.  As the business of selling computers matured, buying hardware and software from mail-order companies became a thing of the past.  Software became so sophisticated that demand for type-in programs virtually disappeared. 

COMPUTE!, RUN, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, Ahoy! and other magazines helped guide the first group of computer enthusiasts into that brave new world.  They began as hand mimeographed newsletters, exploded into hugely successful publishing enterprises with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, and then declined into total oblivion-- all in about ten years.

You can download many 80's computer magazines, in PDF format, from the great Bombjack.org website.