J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

The End Of PC Magazine

Well, not really. Just the print edition: PC Magazine goes 100% digital.

The January 2009 issue (Volume 28, Issue 1) of PC Magazine will mark a monumental transition for the publication. It is the last printed edition of this venerable publication. Of course, as with any technology-related enterprise, this is not the end, but the beginning of something exciting and new.

Frankly, I'm surprised it lasted this long. Who wants to read month-old news?

But I have a special place in my professional heart for PC Magazine. They published my very first computer article. It was the May 1, 1984 edition. Page 145-150: Downloading: Building your own characters. Plus a cleverly-titled sidebar: The "load down" on three printers.

Feeling reminiscent, I dug out my old three-ring binder of articles and snapped this photo:

Notice that it says "COVER STORY." I think that's because it was mentioned on the cover. As I recall, they had a last minute cancellation, and needed to fill some pages, so they decided to go with my article. They'd pretty much print anything back in those days. They need stuff to go in between the ads.

The article describes how to use BASIC to create new characters for your dot matrix printer. It included a page and a half of finely-crafted BASIC code (which I titled FONTEDIT.BAS) that readers could type into their own computer. I'm sure thousands of people are still using that code.

That was the only article I published in PC Magazine. I eventually became a contributing editor for their arch enemy, PC World. Somewhere along the line, I got interested in Excel. And the rest is history...

Those were the days. Nothing like coming back from the mailbox with 30 pounds of magazines, looking forward to an evening of nerdity.

If anyone is interested, here's a fairly comprehensive list of my published articles. It's like a trip down memory lane.