In 1981, I yearned for a personal computer, but they were far out of my reach. There was a computer store a block from my office, though, with Cromemcos and other top-line systems. I left plenty of nose-prints against the glass, wistfully wondering what it'd be like to afford $1,000 for a hobbyist computer. Then the store got a magazine rack... and I began bringing home magazines like Byte and Creative Computing (even though I didn't get a computer for another two years).
God help me, the packrat -- I still have some of these magazines. Every so often, I look through the older magazines -- published a decade before I began contributing to the computer press -- to amuse myself about the cost of storage, or to appreciate the sense of "we are creating this industry together" (such as sharing BASIC source code... you don't get more "open source" than that).
I can reduce the room in the garage somewhat, however, now that I have the Kindle version of The Best of Creative Computing (Volume 3), a reprint of the hardcopy book that David Ahl published (in 1980) from the favorite articles of 1977. Kevin Savetz got Ahl's permission to republish these articles -- and I daresay that Ahl is amused to imagine how futuristic an e-book would have seemed, back then. (Disclosure: I know Kevin Savetz professionally, and he offered me a free copy of the ebook.)
Note that these articles came out before the IBM PC, when Microsoft was 7 guys in cheap offices in Albuquerque. The personal computer was driven by hobbyists who saw the endeavor as a process of discovery and _personal power_. The industry was invented by geeks who had more tech-savvy and personality than business sense. Standards were virtually nonexistent because nobody was sure yet what they ought to be.
All of which makes this a fascinating lens into the past... including looking at the ways we imagined the future. In the first article, for instance, about electronic funds transfer ("EFTS: Living is Better Electronically Or IS IT?" by Deanna J. Dragunas), Dragunas writes, "Imagine receiving bills in the mail, going to your telephone, dialing the bank's computer and directing it by punching out the correct codes and amounts on your touch-tone telephone to move money from your accounts to the accounts of your creditors." (Doesn't that seem old-fashioned now? It was futuristic in 1977.) Adam Osborne predicted a future, 15-20 years away, in which "There will be no programming languages. You will be programming by example. You will create on the screen an image of what it is you want it to do, and the extent to which there is any programming language will be the manner in which you define the variables." There's plenty of technical data too, such as an introduction to file structures and "A Taste of APL."
It's also simply a snapshot of the time, including Ahl's writeup of the First West Coast Computer Faire ("The aisles are crammed wall-to-wall, with four to six people deep around each booth. ... There are approximately 140 booths in the main convention area and another 30 booths, actually mini-booths, around the outside of the main room.") And oh boy it reflects its time: The publisher of Dr Dobbs explains (at the Computer Faire), "Back in the 60s we had happenings in San Francisco... this is just another variation on it except it's a decade later. Back then it was power to the people and now it's computer power to the people." Apple demonstrated its Apple II for the first time at the show (Markula: "We really want to be THE computer company, not the small-business computer company or something else--just the personal computer company!").
The ebook is a scan of the original document, but is comfortably readable. It includes all the old photos and diagrams from the original magazines, which causes me to peer carefully at photos to see whom I recognize. None of my old friends have shown up, so far, but I'm not done yet.
If you're a computing-nostalgia buff, this is irresistible stuff.
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