6 ms·
Living in Europe (but not in the UK), I have similar nostalgic feelings for the UK magazine Personal Computer World (PCW). The library in the tiny town (5k peop
by tpmx 3y ago
Living in Europe (but not in the UK), I have similar nostalgic feelings for the UK magazine Personal Computer World (PCW). The library in the tiny town (5k people) where I grew up somehow had a subscription for PCW in the 80s and 90s. Every month there was a new treasure trove to read. I read it so hard from like 1986 and onwards. (I kind of learned English by reading PCW.)
It's pretty obvious that PCW was modelled after Byte.
(There's a partial scanned collection here: https://archive.org/details/personalcomputerworld?sort=date https://archive.org/details/personalcomputerworld?sort=date)
- dannyobrien 3y agoI loved PCW -- I ended up writing for it in the early nineties, and was ridiculously proud that I had that chance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dcminter 3y agoByte and PCW are the two magazines I really miss. I know we have a wealth of information available to us now that we didn't back then so I shouldn't be sad... and yet :'( If someone put out a physical general computing magazine of a similar quality today I'd subscribe in an instant, but I suppose there's just not enough cranks like me to make it viable. Speaking of quality material, any plans to revive NTK?
- tpmx 3y agoThe German Heise publishing house continues to publish the Byte/PCW-sort-of-like magazine "c't". Useful for keeping any German language skills alive if you're into that. Judging from the latest cover it's at a ~00s technical level (on a PCW Magazine scale) - and they are diversifing, now including things like heat pumps and smart thermostats, heh: https://heise.cloudimg.io/v7/_shop-heise-de_/assets/a/6/0/e/a60ebe4a507df409b3474f160780fae107a7c5f6_ct.2023.22.001.150dpi.jpg https://heise.cloudimg.io/v7/_shop-heise-de_/assets/a/6/0/e/...
- dcminter 3y agoThanks for the tip. I'm sort of background-aware of it, but as I don't read or speak German and online translation lacks a certain flavour, it's not really an option for me. Good to note that there are a few hanging on in other markets - and it certainly had a good reputation. One that I found that was a "close but no cigar" incidentally was the Pi magazine "The MagPi"¹ - but it's a bit thin both physically and in content. I may yet subscribe, though, just in the hope of demonstrating a market exists! ¹ https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/ https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/
- tpmx 3y agoI agree about the MagPi; it's close. I think it would work great as eh, toilet reading material though. Lots of small stories/projects.
- dcminter 3y agoA friend of mine refers to that as "shiterature" :D
- musicale 3y agoIt does feel a bit like a charity/nostalgia project, but I am still glad it exists. I'd like to check out HackSpace as well, since I kind of enjoyed Make: in its heyday.
- dcminter 3y agoI didn't know about HackSpace, so thanks for that; I've ordered a copy. We shall see.
- musicale 3y agoTime to learn German I guess!
- dcminter 3y ago
- jjav 3y ago> physical general computing magazine of a similar quality today I'd subscribe in an instant Same here. Of course, it's not the information itself, which is almost certainly available elsewhere. The curation provided by a high quality magazine is all the value. I get hundreds of potentially interesting articles to read every day from countless email list subscriptions. I don't have time for that so I don't read any. If I could subscribe to something that curates the absolute best content into a monthly package.. where do I send money?
- dannyobrien 3y agoHaha! Weirdly, I'm going to be spending this month trying to see if something like that makes sense.
- Angostura 3y agoI worked in VNU House during the late 89s on another mag. Always wanted to work on PCW never made it, but at least I got to go to press conferences with Kewney, Tebbut et al. Are you one of the moving forces behind NTK? If so, thank you for brightening my Fridays for so long.
- jen20 3y agoLikewise for me with PC Plus, which enabled (via their "Super{Disk,CD}") access to professional programming tools and Linux distributions in the days before internet access with sufficient bandwidth to download them was widespread. Sadly it took a turn towards being consumer-focused in the early 2000s and then died.