Spreading the Word: The Magazines
The magazines basically defined a nationwide small town.
–Carl Helmers, the first editor of Byte magazine
Buying microcomputers by mail required a healthy measure of blind faith. Customers mailed checks to companies they had never heard of to acquire products they couldn’t be sure existed. All they knew was that they wanted a computer, so they mailed their money and waited. And waited. Fortunately for the manufacturers, the earliest buyers of microcomputers rarely demanded customer service. They were hobbyists who would tolerate almost anything—including the mirage world of mail order—to get their own computers.
Soon magazines were coming on the scene to alert the hobbyists to the new machines. But this would prove to be a mixed blessing.
Products were being announced before they were even designed, let alone built, and the magazines supported the practice. Popular Electronics had passed off an empty box as the original Altair and a mock-up as the Processor Technology Sol in a couple of its cover stories. The journalistic excesses were probably harmless, but ads used the same technique. Byte’s Carl Helmers said, “I’m not saying [the technique was] legitimate, but it’s certainly one that’s used all over the place in technology. A product may be there to show in so-called functional simulation form, and that functional simulation is one step toward making the thing actually happen.”
The “functional simulation” was the least misleading of the ads because it at least gave the buyer some idea of what the machine could do. Other ads were more fantastic than factual. “A guy who is in love with writing copy about computers can dream up any kind of system,” said Helmers. “And there were people who did that.”
The computer magazines of the time played dual, almost schizoid roles in this frenzy. Editors encouraged the frenzy by reporting advances, printing ads, and sometimes failing to alert readers to substandard items. Carl Helmers, for instance, rationalized his refusal to assess product quality on the grounds that “products that don’t fulfill [their promises] over the long haul will sort themselves out and die.” But some publications did actively sift the good from the bad. Adam Osborne, who had been selling books out of a cardboard box at Homebrew meetings, started a muckraking column that appeared in Interface Age, and later in InfoWorld, that alerted buyers to the shortcomings of certain products. Dr. Dobb’s Journal, the offshoot of the People’s Computer Company (PCC) newsletter, took a strong consumerist stance, steering readers away from purchases that they’d later regret.
Byte
Byte was one of the great success stories among microcomputer magazines, but the success grew out of conflict and perceived betrayal. Byte was launched in mid-1975, the brainchild of Wayne Green, who had published 73, a magazine for ham-radio enthusiasts. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, resident was part hobbyist and part huckster. Green enjoyed promoting those things he believed in: ham radio, microcomputers, and himself. Some viewed Green as a front-porch philosopher who was fond of contemplative argument and prone to thinking out loud. But others saw a complex individual who could be difficult to work for. His busy, impatient mind would flit from the latest software developments to psychic phenomena, but it always came back to the bottom line. Wayne liked to make money.
By 1975, Green was looking to computerize 73’s circulation department. He called the major minicomputer firms, each of which sent a representative. Every rep warned him of the dangers inherent in buying a rival’s machine. Green found all their warnings convincing. The computer investment was beginning to feel like a leap into darkness. Before paying $100,000 for a computer, Green decided he should learn something about the players in the field.
Green discovered that the computer books and magazines that were available seemed to be written in a foreign language. Only computer-club newsletters were understandable. They also were the only good sources of information about these new microcomputers. The more Green thought about it, the more he realized that he was not alone. The country was full of people who needed an introduction to computers written in plain English.
Green saw his opportunity and decided to create a magazine to ease beginners into microcomputing. He needed a name for his publication, one that was short, catchy, and evocative of the machines themselves. He decided on Byte.
Figure 46. Carl Helmers Helmers, the first editor of Byte magazine, is seen here at the National Computer Conference in the 1970s.
(Courtesy of David H. Ahl)
Green recruited Carl Helmers as editor. Helmers had been issuing a periodical called ECS (Experimenter’s Computer Systems) solo in Boston. Since January 1975, just after the Popular Electronics announcement of the Altair, Helmers had been writing 20 to 25 pages each month on his ideas for building and programming microcomputers. He then shepherded the pages through editing and photo-offset printing and had them distributed to some 300 readers. Helmers accepted Green’s offer and moved to New Hampshire. Green drew his Byte contributors and readership from the early newsletters such as ECS and from his own ham-radio-enthusiast subscribers, believing the latter to be a natural audience for Byte. When the first edition of Byte appeared on August 1, 1975, its 15,000 copies sold out immediately. This was the beginning of a new magazine genre, the personal-computer magazine.
Within a decade, the personal-computer magazine market would support scores of magazines competing for millions of dollars of advertising revenue. At the height of the PC-magazine boom, the leading magazines swelled to 400+ pages and hosted gala awards ceremonies with tuxedo-wearing journalists and CEOs arriving in stretch limos to hand out and receive gold statuettes.
But in the early days, it was considerably less pretentious.
With Wayne’s ex-wife, Virginia Green, as office manager, Helmers as editor, and much of the 73 staff filling in the personnel ranks, Green set about compiling a second issue. He estimated that 20 percent of Byte’s readership came from the 73 mailing list. To beef up the subscription list, Green took the first issue around to manufacturers, including MITS in Albuquerque, Sphere in Salt Lake City, and Southwest Tech in San Antonio. Green was greeted with enthusiasm, and the manufacturers supplied him with customer address lists. Those lists, he guessed, gave Byte another 20 to 25 percent of its subscriptions.
Byte was immediate, chatty, and enthusiastic. It caught the flavor of the computer and electronics hobbyist newsletters, and spoke directly to the people building and buying and lusting for their own microcomputers. It was the right formula, and it was wildly successful.
Wayne Green had struck a mother lode and was exhilarated. But he had one problem. He didn’t own the company. It belonged to Virginia, from whom he had been divorced for 10 years. This unusual arrangement was a result of Green’s legal difficulties: he had been convicted of tax evasion and had other pending legal issues. “The lawyers said we should set up the new magazine as a different corporation and have somebody keep the stock separate from other assets until the suits were resolved,” Green explained. He entrusted Byte to Virginia.
The trouble started almost immediately. Helmers had a good sense of what the computer hobbyists wanted, but Green had been publishing successful magazines for years and was convinced that he had the formula. Anyone should be able to pick up two or three issues and get up to speed, he was convinced. Helmers had put together something far more technical, a kind of bulletin board for a highly technical community.
Green was pushing Helmers to simplify the content to reach a broader audience, and Helmers pushed back. After the first issue hit the stands, he and Virginia forced Wayne out and took over the publication. By January 1977, Byte had a readership of 50,000 and was the premier magazine in the subject area. In its field it had the stature of Scientific American, the in-crowd feel of The Village Voice in the beat era, and the style of a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. Helmers remained as editor and part owner of the company, which he and Virginia eventually sold to publishing giant McGraw-Hill in April 1979. Helmers stayed with the publication until September 1980.
Kilobaud
Wayne Green did not sit still for long. In August 1976, he circulated among the computer manufacturers to find out if they would support a new magazine with him at the helm. The response, he said, was unequivocally positive. Green wanted to call the publication Kilobyte, but Byte claimed it would infringe on its name. Because Green was telling people that the publication’s mission would be to “kill Byte," that was probably not an unreasonable claim; so Green christened his magazine Kilobaud.
Kilobaud was an expansion of a regular feature on computers called “I/O” that Green had run in the pages of 73. The new publication strove to achieve the Wayne Green ideal: anyone should be able to pick up the publication and after reading two or three issues understand its contents. Green lamented that Kilobaud never overtook Byte in circulation or advertising, but it was clearly a success nonetheless.
Green kept an eye on how his market developed. When he started Kilobaud, almost all his readers were hobbyists, people who had no qualms about building their own accessories or using a soldering iron to modify the apparatus. Around 1980, Green recognized a new kind of hobbyist, one who liked to use the equipment but shunned all that tinkering. Responding to this change, Green renamed the magazine to give it broader appeal. He called it Microcomputing. Around the same time, he started another journal, 80 Microcomputing (later called 80 Micro), aimed at users of the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer line. Green later launched other, even more consumer-oriented publications. Helmers and his successors at Byte held Byte to a high technical level for years.
Carl Helmers saw the early periodicals as having a threefold purpose: economic, educational, and social. The magazines defined a market, spread important news, and helped bring hobbyists together. These publications created a nationwide community of computer users. “Peterborough, where I live, is a small town, but it’s geographically constrained,” Helmers said. Like a small town where everyone knows everyone else and news of events is spread almost as soon as they happen, everyone and every event was known among the small village of microcomputer hobbyists, wherever they really lived. And, no publication had more of a small-town flavor than Wayne Green’s early Kilobaud, with its chatty editorials, industry gossip, and calendar of events.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal
To Carl Helmers’s threefold statement of purpose, Jim Warren would have added two more elements: social consciousness and a cheerful antiestablishment attitude straight out of the 1960s.
Warren was chair of the Math Department at the College of Notre Dame, a Catholic women’s academy just north of Silicon Valley. At the time, Warren liked to throw huge get-togethers at his home, with most of the revelers partying in the nude. “The parties were rather sedate by any common standards, except that people didn’t have any clothes on,” he recalled.
Figure 47. Jim Warren Warren was the first editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and launched the West Coast Computer Faire. (Courtesy of Jim Warren)
The media descended on Warren’s home. Playboy photographed these affairs; the BBC filmed them; and Time did an article on them. All the publicity forced the hand of the college officials, who told Warren that his conduct struck a sour note at the Catholic school and asked him to leave. Warren shrugged it off. In this enormous world, there had to be more interesting jobs than this one, he thought.
Warren was looking for something new when a friend suggested that he go into programming. “You’ll pick it up,” the friend assured him. So Warren went to work doing programming at the Stanford University Medical Center and ended up loving it. Just for the sheer fun of it, he became an avid follower of state-of-the-art developments in the field. He had become an enthusiast.
In the early 1970s, the Stanford University Medical Center was also home to the Stanford Free University, which offered an alternative, noninstitutional approach to higher education that was much to Warren’s liking. He soon became the Free University’s executive secretary and newsletter editor, while taking on a variety of consulting jobs. And it was there that he met Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison.
Albrecht was a transplant from the Midwest who had parted ways with Control Data Corporation and was looking for ways to get kids connected with computers. Allison was a Stanford computer-science professor who was as interested in the network of hackers he was building up as he was in computer science. When the Altair appeared, followed by Gates and Allen’s BASIC, Albrecht and Allison began seeking ways to bring their expertise to the cause of spreading the word about computers. Like, say, a magazine.
Byte had debuted in September 1975 and was publishing information on hardware design, but no software magazine existed yet. Hobbyists turned to Albrecht and Allison’s People’s Computer Company newsletter to provide one. Dick Whipple and John Arnold of Tyler, Texas, sent PCC a long list of code that constituted a “Tiny BASIC,” a 2K version of the full-blown BASIC, designed for machines with limited memory. Allison decided to publish a limited-edition, three-issue magazine to get this code into hobbyists’ hands.
The response to the magazine was overwhelming. In January 1976, the publication became an ongoing project called Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia. “Dobb’s” was a contraction of “Dennis” and “Bob,” Allison and Albrecht’s first names. The rest of the title was an in-joke about “running light without overbyte.” Jim Warren was hired to run the publication. Warren thought the name was too specific and soon changed it to Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia.
The magazine published, among other material, classic Tiny BASIC implementations by Li-Chen Wang, Tom Pittman (the consultant who had programmed Intel chips before Gary Kildall), and others, along with all the micro news, rumors, and scuttlebutt Warren could unearth. Dr. Dobb’s adopted an irreverent, folksy tone that reflected the influence that the 1960s had on its editor. Warren believed in contributing one’s efforts to the good of all humanity; in fact, in the early 1970s he wondered whether he should continue working with computers at all. He thought of the machines as mostly gadgets; they were playthings as stimulating as chess but by and large devoid of social utility. As he later put it, “Somewhere back there I’d been raised with a Puritan work ethic (if not all the Puritan values), a make-a-contribution-to-society ethic, which was certainly illustrated in my 10 years of teaching at destitute wages, over which I have no regrets at all.”
Nor did he have any regrets about editing Dr. Dobb’s at $350 a month when he could have been earning far more consulting. Money wasn’t of paramount importance as long as he was making a contribution to society. He liked to quote Dennis Allison’s slogan: “Let’s stand on each other’s shoulders and not on each other’s toes.”
Warren was enjoying himself and believed that others should, too. He infused Dr. Dobb’s with a sense of merriment that became one of the publication’s hallmarks. Idleness might ultimately ruffle his conscience, but pleasure was still one of the great rewards of existence. “Let’s not worry about conformity and tradition. Let’s just do whatever works and let’s have fun doing it,” he said. He was attracted to PCC partly because it was the first periodical to treat computers as objects suited to intellectual forms of recreation.
A Publishing Industry Develops
A large variety of other computer-enthusiast magazines quickly appeared, some of which spun off from existing publications. For instance, PCC spun off Recreational Computing, which addressed a broader and less technically inclined audience. Corporations produced other publications. Computer Notes came straight from MITS and focused on the company’s Altair line. Its editor, David Bunnell, later quit to run the slick-looking Personal Computing magazine, with articles geared to beginners.
Still other magazines grew out of informal newsletters exchanged by hobbyists, while many others seemed to appear spontaneously. Hal Singer and John Craig started the Mark-8 Newsletter to provide information for fellow users of the Mark-8. (Craig later became the editor of Kilobaud.) The Southern California Computer Society produced a newsletter called Interface. After David Ahl left DEC, he started Creative Computing, which had the bright and mirthful air of its somewhat rumpled and clever editor. ROM offered regular contributions from iconoclasts such as Lee Felsenstein and Ted Nelson, and a “chipcake” centerfold of the droid R2D2.
This crop of magazines spread the word about microcomputing and enabled hobbyists in the most far-flung parts of the country to stay current on personal-computing trends. As personal computers matured into a big business in the 1980s, explaining them became a great satellite industry. The demand for information about computers seemed to grow faster than the demand for the equipment itself.
Computer books were now hot. Computer-technology sections appeared in both the chain stores and mom-and-pop bookstores, and began to eat up shelf space. At least a few writers and several publishing houses were making a lot of money on books that explained how to use software, the very same task that a user manual was designed to accomplish. In one legendary deal, a publisher paid a $1.1 million advance for The Whole Earth Software Catalog, a book that offered reviews of software products. The huge advance was thought fair even though many of the reviews would already be out of date before the book was published, recalled Stewart Brand, who coordinated the project.
Industry magazines were evolving right along with the products they featured. The more technically geared magazines, like Byte, spanned platforms (such as computers running the CP/M operating system, IBM PCs, and Macintosh computers) in their coverage and addressed readers interested in all kinds of computers. As the computer became more of a consumer product and the computer market settled into one of two camps, IBM-compatible or Macintosh, magazines became more platform-specific in their coverage. The change was inevitable, because an IBM owner had no use for an article about Macintosh software, and vice versa. These new publications offered elaborate product reviews that helped customers to assess the relative merits of hardware and software. Good reviews were invaluable to vendors. “Product reviews made all the difference,” said Seymour Rubinstein, founder of MicroPro International, which sold the popular WordStar software.
Among the more prolific computer publishers was David Bunnell of MITS, who launched an array of successful computer magazines, including PC Magazine, PC World, MacWorld, Publish, and New Media, and in 1996 became publisher of the computer-business magazine Upside. Bunnell had founded PC Magazine right after the IBM PC debuted, and he published it out of his San Francisco home.
The first issue in January 1982 included a review of John Draper’s EasyWriter word processor that was entitled “Not So Easy Writer.” The product never fully recovered from the review. The first issue of PC Magazine was 100 pages and chock-full of ads, including one from IBM. The second issue went to 400 pages. A year later Bunnell was looking for an outside investor or even a buyer. Both publishing giants Bill Ziff of Ziff-Davis and Pat McGovern of IDG coveted the magazine. Bunnell thought he had an agreement with McGovern, but his initial investor struck a separate deal with Ziff. Bunnell and his staff were furious and resigned en masse to start the rival PC World for IDG. Bunnell thus has the distinction of having started both of the leading magazines for PC users.
Despite its staff’s departure, PC Magazine became a fabulous success. Ziff, too, had a formula. He invested a large initial sum to stake out his territory, then let the paid circulation, product-oriented text, and flashy look and feel do the rest. The formula usually worked well, although he had some conspicuous failures, such as Corporate Computing in 1992. Eventually, Ziff grew tired of managing the company and in 1994 sold it to an investment bank that turned it over two years later to a Japanese entrepreneur for $2.1 billion.
Bunnell’s PC World also thrived, and by the late 1990s both PC World and PC Magazine boasted million-plus circulations that brought in a great tide of ad revenues. Both magazines routinely published issues as thick as phone books. “Getting ads was so easy,” said Bunnell. “All you had to do was answer the phone.”
The computer magazines single-handedly resurrected mail-order computer sales. As customers became more product savvy, they no longer shied away from buying products sight unseen, especially if a magazine had covered the gear in one of its articles. “Mail-order advertising occurred overnight,” said Bunnell. This trend contributed to the rise of Dell Computer and other firms whose businesses were based on direct sales to customers. Mail order also contributed to the downfall of some retail chains. In retrospect, mail order was a harbinger of events to come with the explosive growth of the Internet.
Computer magazines were changing, but remained an important vehicle for promoting and communicating new products and ideas. Another effective method over the years for getting the message across was the computer show.