Okay, this is really going to date me, but here goes. I’m probably one of five people on the planet who noticed that PC Magazine has dropped its print edition. I note it only out of nostalgia (and nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, anyway).
Somewhere back in what now seems like the Chalcolithic Period, I was very, very cool because I had a subscription — a subscription! — to PC Magazine, and I would pass on my copies, after I’d finished with them, to our (one) computer guy. This was before there was an IT department, or before the term “IT” even existed, I think. In the days when three of us were given permission to hook up to this thing called The Internet to investigate whether or not it was potentially useful. In the days when I sat in front of the wood-burning stove in my house (okay, we also had central heating, but “wood-burning stove” sounds so much better in context) reading an exotic thing I’d picked up somewhere called WIRED and, with mounting fascination, tried to figure out what the hell it was about.
This was around the time I attended a conference in Cambridge, England, where someone mentioned something called Mosaic and something under development called the World Wide Web (it’s in my notes).
And it wasn’t that long after I’d attended a how-to-use-this-thing-called-a-Personal-Computer course, during which I asked a very annoyed instructor why we had to install DOS, and then WordMill, from floppy disks every time we turned on the Personal Computer — why couldn’t the Operating System come built in?
Anyway… I will fondly remember those stacks of PC Magazines on the floor. One day, no doubt, l will see them displayed in a museum.
April 9th, 2009 11:39
Wow. I had no idea PC Magazine dropped their print edition.
Most of my favorite magazines have freely-available websites, where you can get all of the content for free, plus more than you get in the print editions. But I still subscribe to the dead tree versions, because I need to time away from a keyboard, and I need something easy to hold in my hand as I lie in bed. And my wireless doesn’t extend out to the patio where I like to sit in the sun (iPhone and laptop don’t have good sun-readable screens anyway).
This makes me sad for some reason. I don’t miss newspapers, but magazines I have a hard time giving up.
April 22nd, 2009 10:18
And the museum is… HCLE: History of Computing in Learning and Education. Right now we have lots of old print versions of PC Magazine. Hopefully soon they will be on line since HCLE intends to be virtual only. The project is moving slowly but it is moving. If any of your readers are interested in helping, email liza@loopcntr.org.
Converting a physical collection to digital is just the first phase of creating a museum. It’s the interpretation and exhibit creation that will really be a challenge. But hey, what is life for?
And I agree completely with the comment about readability in the sun.