“Creative computing” magazine
Posted: November 14th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Recently ran across this curious magazine called “Creative Computing“, one of the earliest covering the microcomputer revolution (published from 1974 until December 1985). Readers interested in this can have a look at the some articles.
With titles such as “Is breaking into a time-sharing system a crime?”, “Why Supermarkets Are Going Bananas Over Computers”, “Videodiscs – The Ultimate Computer Input Device?” or “How Much Privacy Should You Have?”, the magazine is definitely an intriguing read today. The topic addressed there ranged from artificial (and “extra-terrestrial”) intelligence, computers in education, languages and programming theories, BASIC scripts, upcoming technologies, games and fictions (with “art and poetry”).
For people interested in current “trends” such as DIY or privacy, there is plenty to explore in order to understand some underlying roots. See for instance “amateur computing” or How One Computer Manufacturer Looks at the Data Privacy/Security Issue
Why do I blog this? sunday afternoon hops on the internets always lead to curious material. Possibly useful to show students some examples of computer culture history.
Ah, yes. I remember that and its brethren quite fondly. In high school, as my fellow geeks and I were getting into computers, we used to go to the school library every lunch hour and grab these magazines. I remember this one – the grandfather publication – and other newcomers like COMPUTE! (with exclamation mark). It’s hard to remember what content I would enjoy and why; I think reading about the brand names and the very very recent but already ancient history (the ALTAIR which people would write about but if I recall didn’t have a screen or a keyboard but was technically a computer), Diablo printers, Sinclair (later Timex/Sinclair). Lots of hardware descriptions, ads for peripherals, and I guess the one thing I was really drawn to was the program listings – mostly for games. I would take those magazines to the Commodore PET lab after school and type them in (later I would take them home to my VIC-20 and type them in) – inevitably with typos that were impossible to debug. One innovation was the creation of some sort of checksum code that was in the program listing to help catch data entry typos.
It’s hard to see any vestiges of that teen-life-with-computers in my later years, no one knows what PEEK and POKE refers to any more, it’s maybe like those serious business people who used to be skateboarders in their youth; you wouldn’t know it, it doesn’t necessarily translate, but it’s there beneath the surface. I don’t know, Nicolas, maybe skateboarder is a bad analogy?????
It’s good to have your memories about this!
As for the skateboarding analogy, I see what you mean and I think it’s fairly right. Some peeps just forgot a subset of their culture and cannot recall the origins of certain things… and think the POKE meme has been created by Facebook…
Seems to be a text-only archive of COMPUTE! at http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/issuelist.php (I scanned quickly and within 30 seconds found the errata for a program I typed in back in the day).
The last issues are really less interesting then the first. As if the content shifted to less “creative computing”.