If you reach a certain age, you may remember People’s Computer Company (PCC) From the 1970s. It is not a real company, but a popular computer communication with the visual style of the times. In the first issue published in October 1972, the founders Dennis Allison, Bob Albrecht, and George Firedrake explained their reasons for creating the newsletter:
Computers are mainly used to deal with people, not for people. They are used to control people instead of people. free They; it’s time to change all of this-we need a… People’s Computer Company
The Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California has a print collection with these issues [Jim Warren], Spanning its ten-year publishing operation (it was renamed Casual computing 1979).Although the museum is closed to the public these days due to concerns about Covid, supporters of CHM [Bob Zeidman] All issues have been scanned and are available at CHM Collection File.
It’s really interesting to browse through these old questions and see the types of topics of interest at the time. Many people will still be interested today, and many others have become obsolete due to technological advancement (but if you are interested in inverse computing, it is still interesting to read). For example, in the first issue, you can learn why different lenses can be used on Bell & Howell film projectors, a comparison of DEC and HP computers used in educational environments, and how to save teletypewriter maintenance contracts and consumables such as TTY Paper, ribbons and punched tape. If you have time to kill time, please check these files and let yourself go back to that era. Desktop publishing actually means freehand typing and drawing with a metal pen on special templates, which are installed on the drum of the mimeograph, one page at a time .
PCC is an early proponent of copyright-free software, teaching computer programming, using computer games as a learning tool, and encouraging everyone to have computer knowledge. They do this not only through newsletters, but also through educational books, an organization called ComputerTown USA!Used to educate children, and derivative journals, such as Longyan with Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Bodybuilding and Orthodontics (edit [Jim Warren] Mentioned above), which later became a popular computer magazine Dr. Dob’s Diary It was not published until 2014. A few years ago, we wrote an article about the PCC software-defined radio project in 1975. Do you have any favorite old journal archives that you like to read from time to time?