''Creative Computing'' was one of the earliest magazines covering the
microcomputer revolution
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer whe ...
. 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 byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...
''.
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
Basic or BASIC may refer to:
Science and technology
* BASIC, a computer programming language
* Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base
* Basic access authentication, in HTTP
Entertainment
* Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film
...
. By the late 1970s, it had moved towards more general coverage as the
microcomputer
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...
market emerged. Hardware coverage became more common, but
type-in program
A type-in program or type-in listing was computer source code printed in a home computer magazine or book. It was meant to be entered via the keyboard by the reader and then saved to cassette tape or floppy disk. The result was a usable game, ut ...
s remained common into the early 1980s.
The company published several books, the most successful being ''
BASIC Computer Games
''BASIC Computer Games'' is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well. Among its better-known games are '' Hamurabi'' and '' Su ...
'', 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
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
for the popular computer systems of the time and had a small hardware business.
Ziff Davis
Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and internet company. Founded in 1927 by William Bernard Ziff Sr. and Bernard George Davis, the company primarily owns technology- and health-oriented media websites, online shopping-related servi ...
purchased ''Creative Computing'' in 1982 and closed the non-magazine endeavors.
History
DEC and Edu
Prior to starting ''Creative Computing'', in the early 1970s
David H. Ahl was working in the educational department of
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...
(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
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...
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
The PDP-8 is a family of 12-bit minicomputers that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first commercially successful minicomputer, with over 50,000 units sold during the model's lifetime. Its basic design follows the pi ...
combined with a
VT50 terminal, and a briefcase-sized version of the PDP-8 with a small
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
that would be used with an external
computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...
. 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
AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...
.
Formation
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
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...
and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.
Instead of printing 850 copies, Ahl split the subscription money in two; he kept one half for future operations, and used the other half to print as many copies of the new magazine as he could. This allowed for the printing of 8,000 copies of the first edition, which were completed on 7 October 1974. The subscribers were sent their copies first, but the rest were sent for free to a wide variety of companies, libraries and schools. He followed the same pattern for the next three issues. The trick worked, and subscriptions began to pour in. During this period the magazine was based in
Morristown, New Jersey
Morristown () is a Town (New Jersey), town in and the county seat of Morris County, New Jersey, Morris County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. .
Growth
By August 1975 the magazine had 2,500 subscribers. In January, the Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer introduced in 1974 by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) based on the Intel 8080 CPU. It was the first commercially successful personal computer. Interest in the Altair 8800 grew quickly after i ...
had been announced and Ahl began looking for new authors who could write for the exploding microcomputer market. By 1976 the content was roughly split between the education and microcomputing market. At that point, the magazine started actively looking for advertisers and the November/December 1976 issue was the first to be printed on coated paper rather than
newsprint
Newsprint is a low-cost, non-archival paper consisting mainly of wood pulp and most commonly used to print newspapers and other publications and advertising material. Invented in 1844 by Charles Fenerty of Nova Scotia, Canada, it usually has ...
to provide better quality ads.
By 1978 the subscriptions hit 60,000, and revenue was approaching $1 million. In July 1978, Ahl quit his position at AT&T to work at ''Creative Computing'' full time. This caused friction with his wife. In August, they purchased ROM magazine and two smaller newsletters and combined their content into the magazine. In January 1979, the magazine went monthly from bimonthly.
By 1979 the magazine had outgrown the single-family home it was being run from, and Ahl looked for a larger duplex home that would allow him to live with his wife in one half and run the magazine from the other. It was at this time that
Regis McKenna, the advertising company handling
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...
, was asked to pay an overdue advertising bill. The advertising company provided a canceled check proving they had already done so. When Ahl and his business manager began tracking it down, the police were called and found that two people in their company had embezzled $100,000 by sending some incoming cheques to their own account at a different bank. This was only discovered because one of the conspirators had forgotten to mark the bill with McKenna as paid, causing a second invoice to be sent out.
When she was told the story, Ahl's wife had enough and kicked him out of the house pending a
divorce
Divorce (also known as dissolution of marriage) is the process of terminating a marriage or marital union. Divorce usually entails the canceling or reorganising of the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage, thus dissolving the M ...
.
[: "Having recently been divorced, he was planning to live in one half of the house."] He moved into the only unused room in the other side of the building. During this time,
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his 1997 ''Forbes'' p ...
, known for the invention of
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...
, was briefly the editor. Nelson would arrive at 5 pm and work all night, waking Ahl in the bedroom when he started printing on a
Qume daisy wheel printer. In October 1980 the company moved to a much larger office building.
Through this period, featured writers included
Robert Swirsky,
David Lubar, and
John J. Anderson. The magazine regularly included
BASIC
Basic or BASIC may refer to:
Science and technology
* BASIC, a computer programming language
* Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base
* Basic access authentication, in HTTP
Entertainment
* Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film
...
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer.
Since a computer, at base, only ...
for utility programs and games, which users could manually enter into their home computers. The April issues, starting in 1980, became famous for their parodies of the major computer magazines of the time.
Ziff-Davis
Larger publishers began taking note of the computer market. A watershed moment was in 1979 when
McGraw-Hill
McGraw Hill is an American education science company that provides educational content, software, and services for students and educators across various levels—from K-12 to higher education and professional settings. They produce textbooks, ...
purchased ''
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...
''. By 1982, most of the quality magazines had been purchased and only a few large ones remained independent, including ''
Compute!
''Compute!'' (), often stylized as ''COMPUTE!'', is an American home computer magazine that was published from 1979 to 1994. Its origins can be traced to 1978 in Len Lindsay's ''PET Gazette'', one of the first magazines for the Commodore PET. ...
'', ''
Interface Age'', ''
Family Computing
''Family Computing'' (later ''Family & Home Office Computing'' and ''Home Office Computing'') was an American computer magazine published by Scholastic Corporation, Scholastic from the 1980s to the early 2000s. It covered all the major home comp ...
'' and ''Creative Computing''.
Realizing they were being pushed out of the market due to the huge budgets and marketing power of these major players, in 1982 Ahl approached several potential buyers, including
Atari
Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French holding company Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) and its focus is on "video games, consumer hardware, licensing and bl ...
,
CBS and
Ziff-Davis
Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and internet company. Founded in 1927 by William Bernard Ziff Sr. and Bernard George Davis, the company primarily owns technology- and health-oriented media websites, online shopping-related servic ...
. In 1982 Ahl sold the company to Ziff-Davis, which at that time published 28 different magazines. Ahl remained the Editor-in-Chief.
[ The magazine moved to Los Angeles, California. At their peak, the magazine reached about 500,000 subscriptions.
Through the early 1980s, and especially with the launch of the ]IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...
, the market began to shift from a hobby-and-educational oriented one to more and more business applications. Ziff quickly shifted the focus of the magazine to be more software-oriented, and the programming articles disappeared shortly after the sale. This attempt to refocus on business computing was not successful, and when Bill Ziff had a cancer scare in 1985 he began concentrating his businesses, selling off many of the specialty magazines. Ziff ultimately ceased publication of ''Creative Computing'' in December 1985.
Other magazines
The company also began publication of several other magazines at different times, but none of these were very successful and tended to have very short production runs. Among these were ''Small Business Computing'', ''Sync Magazine'' for the ZX81
The ZX81 is a home computer that was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and designed to be a low-c ...
, and ''Video and Arcade Games''.
Books
The company also published several books. Among these were three volumes of ''The Best of Creative Computing Magazine'' (Creative Computing Press) in 1976, 1977, and 1980. The cover of volume 2 was illustrated by underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton
Gilbert Shelton (born May 31, 1940) is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters '' The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers'', '' Fat Freddy's Cat'', and '' Wonder ...
. ''101 BASIC Computer Games'' was ported to Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first v ...
and published in 1978 as ''BASIC Computer Games
''BASIC Computer Games'' is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well. Among its better-known games are '' Hamurabi'' and '' Su ...
''. It became the first million-selling computer book. This was followed by ''More BASIC Computer Games'' in 1979.
It also published the first ''The Best of Byte'' collection, in spite of being friendly competitors with ''Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...
''. The relationship ended with the McGraw-Hill purchase.
Software
A number of home computer games were published under the Sensational Software banner, also known as Creative Computing Software. Their best seller was a version of ''Space Invaders
is a 1978 shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Taito for Arcade video game, arcades. It was released in Japan in April 1978, with the game being released by Midway Manufacturing overseas. ''Space Invaders'' was the first fixed s ...
'' for the Apple II
Apple II ("apple Roman numerals, two", stylized as Apple ][) is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The Apple II (original), original Apple II model, which gave the series its name, was designed ...
. Ziff-Davis closed the division as they felt it competed with their advertisers.
Titles included:
* ''Air Traffic Controller (1978 video game), Air Traffic Controller'' (1979)
*: Released on cassette for the TRS-80 and Apple II.
* ''Space Games-3'' (1980) ''CS-3002''
*: A collection of 4 games, containing ''Ultratrek'', ''Romulan'', ''Starwars'', ''Starlanes''; released on cassette for the TRS-80.
* '' Space and Sport Games'' (1980)
*: A collection of 9 games, with 3 space games amongst them. Released on diskette for the Apple II.
* ''Super Invasion/Spacewar'' (1980)
*: A collection of 2 games, containing '' Super Invasion'' and '' Spacewar''; released on diskette for the Apple II.
* '' Action & Bumping Games'' (1981)
*: A collection of 6 games, containing ''Bumper Blocks'', ''Obstacle Course'', ''Hustle Jr.'', ''Moto Jump'', ''Mine Rover'', ''Road Machine''; released on diskette for the Apple II.
* ''Milestones
A milestone is a marker of distance along roads.
Milestone may also refer to:
Measurements
*Milestone (project management), metaphorically, markers of reaching an identifiable stage in any task or the project
*Software release life cycle state, s ...
'' (1981)
*: Released on cassette and diskette for the Apple II.
*'' Micro Golf'' (1981)
Hardware
The company briefly sold hardware under the Peripherals Plus brand. The main product was a music card for the Apple II, and they offered a plotter
A plotter is a machine that produces vector graphics drawings. Plotters draw lines on paper using a pen, or in some applications, use a knife to cut a material like Polyvinyl chloride, vinyl or leather. In the latter case, they are sometimes k ...
and other products. Ziff closed this division as well.
Notes
References
Other sources
*
*
* {{Cite interview , last=Savetz , first=Kevin , title=Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl , url=https://computingpioneers.com/index.php/Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl , date=3 April 2013
External links
* Three ''Best of Creative Computing'' volumes are available a
AtariArchives.org
* The full text of most of the issues from the last three years (1983–1985) of this magazine can be found a
AtariMagazines.com
* Full page scans of most issues, except the earliest three years, can be found a
Archive.org
1974 establishments in New Jersey
1985 disestablishments in California
Atari 8-bit computer magazines
Defunct computer magazines published in the United States
Home computer magazines
Magazines established in 1974
Magazines disestablished in 1985
Magazines published in New Jersey
Magazines published in Los Angeles