Reprinted from my blog at SheepGuardingLlama.com
My love of computers began in the summer of 1979 when my father sat me down and showed me BASIC programming on a Commodore SuperPET computer that he had been able to bring home for the weekend from Eastman Kodak where he worked. I was hooked. The idea that you could type instructions into a computer and make it do things was simply mind blowing. This was what I wanted to do.
Much of my childhood, especially my younger years, was shaped by the continuing search for access to computers. In the early 1980s access to computing resources was hard to acquire. None of my friends had computers at home. We certainly didn't have one at home. We talked about it always but did not get one ourselves until my family got a Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1987. So between 1979 and 1987 my access to computers was purely through means such as my father borrowing one from the office or having a friend of the family's let me use theirs (this was how I accessed several original Apple Macintosh computers when they first released) or at places like the library. My school did not have a computer until a few years after we had one at home and even then they put in a single 8-bit computer years into the 16-bit era (my middle school's solitary Apple ][c computer sits on the desk next to me today as a part of my early home computing collection.) Of all of the ways that I had to access computers during these years, and even into the era when I had the Amiga 1000 at home, was through magazines.
One of my more vivid early childhood memories is of taking two issues of Commodore Magazine with me one time when my mother went to the hair salon in York, NY. The salon used to be down the street from our house but had moved and it had just opened in the new location and we had to drive down there so that she could get her hair done so I had nothing to do but sit and wait with my magazines. The magazines talked about the popular Commodore 64 and the newly released, amazingly powerful Commodore 128 (both of which I own today) and showed off dot matrix printers, color monitors and 300 baud modems. It had programs that you could type into your computer and actually run and it reviewed video games that sounded amazing. I still remember that the particular issue that I read that day in what I would estimate was around 1987 because that appears to be when Commodore Magazine began being published but we got our Amiga later in 1987 so it was probably in that interim time.
Reading Commodore, Compute!, Byte and other magazines in that era were my bread and butter of entertainment. They were great as historical pieces too because going back to them gave you a way to see where computing was at a moment in time. What hardware, software, ideas, topics, games and predictions existed at the time that the magazine came out. Since I kept a collection of computer magazines all throughout my childhood I always had this reference and I used it often, fantasizing about the day that I would have unlimited access to computers of my own.
Today as I go through my remaining computer magazine collection I notice that the magazines that I have held on to the longest, most notably Linux Magazine, resembles those magazines of my childhood in many ways. While being nearly two entire decades more recent, Linux Magazine from circa 2003 is extremely reminiscent of computer magazines in 1985. A bit more polished and quite a bit more technical there is something about the culture, the excitement that Linux had ten years ago that reminds me of the Commodore 64 era. As I go through the magazines tonight as I send them out to be recycled in the morning I flip the pages and see "type in" scripts not unlike those programs in BASIC to play "Lazer Chess" on the Amiga. I see adds for specialty software that is out of the mainstream. Talk of games, glimpses at new technologies and hopes for the future. I see a point in time glimpse into the exciting world of open source computing in its heyday when everyone was discussing if Linux was valid and if it had any hopes of success and how open source computing would change the world. It was an era of hobbyist turning into professionals much as the 8bit era had provided for us so long ago.
It is sad for me to let these magazines go. Not just because I am sorry that I threw out the magazines of my youth but also because these too mark a point in my history and in the history of the field. Computing and IT are themselves bound up with my own history. I've lived my life running alongside the development of home computing. The milestones in computing's history coincide with changes in my own life. Looking at where computing was at any moment reminds me of where I was too. Looking at an issue of Linux Magazine on my desk right now reminds me of so much and looking at the shipping label on it reminds me that I would have received this magazine at my house in Ithaca just days before Dominica and I got engaged, just days before we finalized the details of buying our first house, six months before we would be married and while my mom was still alive. In that era Mandrake Linux had just failed and gone bankrupt, Perl 6 had just released, Eclipse (the Java IDE was a hot topic) and PHP was all the rage. And, of course, 2003 was declared "The Year of the Linux Desktop."
Today is my last day of owning computing magazines. Tonight will be the first time since I was probably six years old that I haven't had some form of home computing magazine sitting around the house waiting for me to pour over and dream of what amazing project I will pursue. I am entering a leaner, but less nostalgic era of my life. Hopefully the computing world is ready for the change.