Most of the people writing "BASIC Zines" weren't BASIC vendors. Some were code-inspired journalists doing it for "real" magazines that wanted "hip" computer con

Most of the people writing "BASIC Zines" weren't BASIC vendors. Some were code-inspired journalists doing it for "real" magazines that wanted "hip" computer content. (The brief period where BASIC was hip computing content was brief.) Some were "hackers" of various sorts doing it for fun and maybe a quick dollar, cheaply photocopied, pamphlet style for the cheapest racks in book stores or software stores (remember those?) or viral distribution in schools. I'm sure most of the original Zines didn't make that much income. It was thought that the latter sorts of "cool hackers" sending photocopied pamphlets to schools or book stores (or software stores) stopped doing it as much when BASIC stopped being the "operating system" of home computers (the Commodore 64 was one of many that booted directly to a BASIC REPL; the early IBM PCs either booted to BASIC or had a BASIC interpreter close to hand) and BASIC interpreters stopped being "everywhere". Now the web browser is the modern OS and Dev Tools are ubiquitous and a single button press away (almost universally F12). JS REPLs are right there for immediate use and ES2020+ is the friendliest JS has ever been. I think all we're missing are the "hacker teachers" with the right punk attitudes, an access to a Xerox, and the right sort of store willing to sell home made zip lock bags full of photocopies again. (Or I don't know, a cheap webpage could be cool too. Make it Geocities-esque with lots of classic Under Construction GIFs and encourage people to fork it and construct it themself.)