Comments on: The Demise of PC Magazine

By: Kadish « Simple Country Physicist

Kadish « Simple Country Physicist — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:57:43 +0000

[...] the student newspaper of the campus of the Boneyard, and now a blot of the demise of PC magazine. [Link] (I regret not having a link-citation for the DI article; at the time it did not seem worth [...]

By: Adrian von Bidder

Adrian von Bidder — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:09:47 +0000

Could you fax me those floppies, please?

By: Gunnar

Gunnar — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:55:50 +0000

I wrote during 2007 the Linux section of the Spanish PC Magazine. It’s funny to me to realize that this would have been my childhood dream (I had collected over four years of PCMag USA issues)… While at the same time, I am now embarassed to even list it on my academic CV – I took the opportunity to write in PCMag because it is a magazine distributed all over Latin America, and I’d rather take the microphone than to leave it there for any other non-Free-Software-loving person! Of course, after a long year trying to come up with sales-like articles pushing Free Software being rebranded and sometimes rewritten (and stupidly! Once I got an ad for NERO inserted in an article I wrote about firewall configuration helpers!), Ziff Davis told me they were no longer interested in a Linux section… Well, what can I say? Their loss…
Sigh… Neither I feel strongly about this demise. What is a real shame is that they let a great magazine sink to that abysal depths.
…Of course, then again think about my beloved 1980s BYTE, and…
Sigh.

By: Russ Allbery

Russ Allbery — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:46:03 +0000

The comma was a TOPS-20 thing. All of CompuServe ran on TOPS-20 under the hood. You could even escape out to a shell prompt under some circumstances.

Stanford used to run TOPS-20 as well, but of course we haven’t for many years. It was pretty common in educational institutions, though.

By: Omari

Omari — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:47:15 +0000

Agreed. I also reacted with a shrug when I saw that PC Mag is going online only. There’s been nothing in there that’s been worth reading for years now. It’s always “20 Vista Speed Tricks” and “20 Must Have Free Downloads.” The Windows tricks are always “Defrag!” and “Clean out the registry!” and “Stop programs from running at startup!” and the free downloads are always registry cleaners and startup program cops.

After I stopped reading the magazine I did read the columns online for awhile, but even stopped that after I got tired of Dvorak trolling.

I doubt there are many that will miss PC Magazine.