Decade-old magazines

[squirmelia]

Wired - July/August 1995 issue - Issue 1.07 (£3.50)

The UK version (1.07) and the US version (3.07) of this issue of Wired appear to be mostly the same, but it seems there are a few noticeable differences. Douglas Coupland's Microserfs: Transhumanity (an excerpt from Microserfs) is lacking from the UK version. Perhaps it was published in a later edition or perhaps I tore it out and stored it somewhere unknown.

The UK edition had a review of Kill Your Boyfriend, which made me really want to read it. It also reviewed Mark Leyner's Toothprints on a Corn Dog, but suggested that Et Tu, Babe was a better book.

Both the UK edition and the US edition had articles on Richard Dawkins' selfish genes and hot memes, random typefaces and technopagans. ("Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space; everything is flat and gray. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it.")

Jargon Watch contained useful phrases such as "Batmobiling - Putting up an emotional shield just as a relationship enters that intimate, vulnerable stage. Refers to the retractable armor covering the Batmobile."


.net - June 1995 - Issue 7 (£2.99)

Number on the spine is 27.1m, which was the estimate of world internet usage. (In comparison, now in 2005, it is estimated at 888,681,131.)

According to .net magazine, FTP was still the most popular form of Internet traffic on the NSFnet backbone. (Although some estimates say that "WWW surpasses ftp-data in March 2005 as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April 2005 based on byte count.")

The percentage of Estonian primary and secondary schools connected to the Internet: 16%
(In comparison, apparently all Estonian schools are now connected to the Internet).

A short article titled "Who needs drugs when you've got modems?" explained that social pathologies were stating to develop in 'cyberspace'. An ad-hoc survey of internet users found that 22% said that using online services produced "a cocaine-like rush" and 12% said it helped them to relax. "An on-line service is not as reliable as cocaine or alcohol, but in the contemporary world, it is a fairly reliable way of shifting consciousness."

pHreak BBS is reviewed and described as "One of the UK's most underground and out-there bulletin boards." (It may even still be vaguely existing.)


Amiga Power - June 1995 - Issue 50 (£4.25 with 2 cover disks)

Issue 50 was an issue that celebrated "50 glorious years of Amiga Power" and discussed Amiga Power over the years ("The golden era", "the indie years", "the techno time", etc) and even had an article on some of the contributors to "Do the Write Thing". Definitely a handy issue to have around when you start wondering, "who was Isabelle Rees?".

The cover disks included "Valhalla In The Style Of a dance music track": It's a Skull.

Commodore had just been bought by Escom.

Weetaflakes in yellow bags had been consigned to heaven.

Other articles included "Whatever happened to the the future of manga?", and reviews of games such as "Ultimate Soccer Manager" and "Bloodnet A500+"

Comments

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

We found old technical magazines in the work coffee room when everything was moved around. One of them contained an advert for a daisywheel printer, cheap at nearly 1000 pounds.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Wow, they must have been quite old, although I hope the coffee was not as ancient. The magazines from 10 years ago do not seem old at all to me, I still try to mimic "It's a Skull" on occasion.

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

i have a copy of MS Word 5.0 for Mac, still in its original shrink-wrapped box. 1992, i believe.

[xgray.livejournal.com]

wow...the last good version of word.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I suspect you might be right on that one.

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

i quite agree. (i do all my writing in BBEdit now; if i absolutely must have formatting, Mariner Write is my word processor of choice.)

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Kill Your Boyfriend is amazing! A comic to live and die by.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Especially when experiencing cocaine-like rushes.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Hmm... are those the plants I saw growing by the riverbanks of Eynsford?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

You mean the well-known modem flower?

[roseseule.livejournal.com]

I love reading old computer gaming mags...just for the prices and amount of memory they were hyping. It's fun to read about how Doom 2 will push the graphical limits of what is possible on a computer. AND DUCK NUKEM FOREVER STILL ISN'T OUT YET!!!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Totally. Did I really pay about £60 (about $109) for an extra 512k on an Atari ST? Seems crazy now and that wasn't even really a long time ago.

[subbes]

Ah, the eternal "Haven't played it." of the Duke Nukem.

[subbes]

I lost my copy of It's A Skull and Jonathan didn't want to send me a copy from his (somewhat broken) Mac, so thanks for the link. I forget if his time as Ed was mentioned at asll in that ish -- it might have been so small as to be negligible in AP times, and he was a traitor anyway having come from YS.

You've seen AP2, right?

[subbes]

Since someone else mentioned their old magazines, beyond my AP issues, my oldest magazine is a copy of Sega Power from the time of that "are video games too violent?" outrage over some Sega MegaCD game with a girl in her bra shot on grainy film. Nightstalker, was it? I think that outrage had something to do with the video game rating thing in the US.

Also, a shitload of Horse & Ponys from before they turned into another pre-teen girl magazine that happened to have horses in it, and a couple of Just Seventeens before they realised no-one of age 17 was reading them so they renamed to J17.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen AP2, although the link on there to It's a Skull didn't quite work, so I had to hunt around a bit further.

Issue 50 seemed to be the last where he was editor, so there were messages of farewell scattered amongst the pages.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Oops, I meant a different Jonathan.

[grey-area.livejournal.com]

I miss my Amiga 500. *sniff* I findly remember trying to save up for a ginormous 60Mb external HDD because I was getting really tired of swapping the 11, 21, 25, (insert two-digit number) disks that all the good games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones came on. And I also miss flashy animated hacker screens where multi-coloured balls, streaks and heavy-metal logos bounced to overclocked midi jingles and thereby informed you that your copy of Stuntcar Racer had (fifteen copy-generations before) been cracked by Th3 KrEEw or somesuch. And I miss the screwy black humour of guru errors. The blue screen of death hasn't got anything near the amount of menace and frustration that red on black box used to evoke.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

The disk drive on my A600 has stopped working, which is terribly sad. I miss the flashy animated hacker screens too, they were awesome, but in some ways I am glad the red on black box does not hinder me any longer.

[daven.livejournal.com]

oh the nostalgia, makes me wanna look out my old MSDOS 6.2 disks and frame them ('twas recalled and replaced with 6.22)

still play Day of The Tentacle, found it in cash converters for £5!

when i saw "decade old magazines", for some reasons i didn't think it would be as recent as '95, if you know what i mean...

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Don't frame the disks, wear them!

Yeah, 1995 doesn't feel like a decade ago.

[daven.livejournal.com]

apparetly we might have dos 5 lying around somewhere, i got about 2 working sets of windows 3.1 and 3.11, an almost working set of OS/2 warp, and god knows how many other retro gems

wear them, but where?