Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Creative Computing (magazine)
Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented Byte.
The magazine was created to cover educational-related topics. Early issues include articles on the use of computers in the classroom, various simple programs like madlibs and various programming challenges, mostly in BASIC. By the late 1970s, it had moved towards more general coverage as the microcomputer market emerged. Hardware coverage became more common, but type-in programs remained common into the early 1980s.
The company published several books, the most successful being BASIC Computer Games, the first million-selling computer book. Their Best of Creative Computing collections were also popular. Creative Computing also published software on cassette and floppy disk for the popular computer systems of the time and had a small hardware business.
Ziff Davis purchased Creative Computing in 1982 and closed the non-magazine endeavors.
Prior to starting Creative Computing, in the early 1970s David H. Ahl was working in the educational department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he started publication of their Edu newsletter in the spring of 1971. At the time, DEC had an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 machines being used in educational settings, so he was surprised to find the number of subscribers reach 20,000 after 18 months. He found that many subscribers did not have a DEC machine but were using Edu as a source of general information on computers in educational settings. This began his earliest thoughts about a non-DEC magazine aimed at this market.
On 22 February 1973, Ahl was let go during a downsizing at DEC. Even before he received his last paycheck, he was hired by a different department to help develop new low-end versions of the DEC minicomputer line. During this period he collected many user submissions to Edu and convinced DEC to publish 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973. This was a hit, eventually selling over 10,000 copies in three publishing runs in July 1973, April 1974, and March 1975.
By 1974, the team had produced two new designs, a PDP-8 combined with a VT50 terminal, and a briefcase-sized version of the PDP-8 with a small floppy disk that would be used with an external computer terminal. Other divisions within DEC saw these inexpensive machines as a threat to their own products and agitated against them, causing debates that eventually worked their way to the CEO. When the new designs were personally canceled by Ken Olsen with the statement that "I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own" Ahl quit DEC and took a position at AT&T.
It was at this point that Ahl decided to move ahead with the educational-focused magazine. Reasoning that the educational market would be of interest to public foundations and many companies, Ahl sent funding proposals to over a hundred companies and received nothing. Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.
Hub AI
Creative Computing (magazine) AI simulator
(@Creative Computing (magazine)_simulator)
Creative Computing (magazine)
Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented Byte.
The magazine was created to cover educational-related topics. Early issues include articles on the use of computers in the classroom, various simple programs like madlibs and various programming challenges, mostly in BASIC. By the late 1970s, it had moved towards more general coverage as the microcomputer market emerged. Hardware coverage became more common, but type-in programs remained common into the early 1980s.
The company published several books, the most successful being BASIC Computer Games, the first million-selling computer book. Their Best of Creative Computing collections were also popular. Creative Computing also published software on cassette and floppy disk for the popular computer systems of the time and had a small hardware business.
Ziff Davis purchased Creative Computing in 1982 and closed the non-magazine endeavors.
Prior to starting Creative Computing, in the early 1970s David H. Ahl was working in the educational department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he started publication of their Edu newsletter in the spring of 1971. At the time, DEC had an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 machines being used in educational settings, so he was surprised to find the number of subscribers reach 20,000 after 18 months. He found that many subscribers did not have a DEC machine but were using Edu as a source of general information on computers in educational settings. This began his earliest thoughts about a non-DEC magazine aimed at this market.
On 22 February 1973, Ahl was let go during a downsizing at DEC. Even before he received his last paycheck, he was hired by a different department to help develop new low-end versions of the DEC minicomputer line. During this period he collected many user submissions to Edu and convinced DEC to publish 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973. This was a hit, eventually selling over 10,000 copies in three publishing runs in July 1973, April 1974, and March 1975.
By 1974, the team had produced two new designs, a PDP-8 combined with a VT50 terminal, and a briefcase-sized version of the PDP-8 with a small floppy disk that would be used with an external computer terminal. Other divisions within DEC saw these inexpensive machines as a threat to their own products and agitated against them, causing debates that eventually worked their way to the CEO. When the new designs were personally canceled by Ken Olsen with the statement that "I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own" Ahl quit DEC and took a position at AT&T.
It was at this point that Ahl decided to move ahead with the educational-focused magazine. Reasoning that the educational market would be of interest to public foundations and many companies, Ahl sent funding proposals to over a hundred companies and received nothing. Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.