Skip to main content

Farewell, PC Magazine. I haven't read you for years, but I'll miss you

I gather from Martyn Daniels' blog that PC Magazine is to cease publication. I find this sad, as I started my professional writing career doing pieces for computer magazines, and PC Magazine was the daddy of them all.

I had already had one sad moment when PC Week died. Although not my very first publication, PC Week was where I started writing regularly. This free weekly survived on advertising and job ads - it was the rise of IT job websites that killed it. Now PC Magazine is moving to be web only.

Although I never wrote for it (though I did have a column for quite a while in its UK home-grown rival, Personal Computer World), PC Magazine was the authoritative source when I first became involved in PCs back in the mid-80s (yes, children, we had PCs in the 1980s). Back then, I couldn't have done my job without it. Now it has virtually gone virtual.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Jane Smith21 November 2008 at 09:45

    Oh, my word--you're THAT Brian Clegg. I think I used to know you all those years ago, when I worked in computer games publishing... good grief.

    (I doubt that you'd remember me--I worked in sales and marketing and our paths rarely crossed; but I did know of you, because I used to read your pieces.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brian Clegg21 November 2008 at 12:58

    Jane - I've always felt I was THAT Brian Clegg, but I've never realised why...

    Seriously, it's quite possible. I used to review games for a couple of VNU publications off an on, sometime for PC Week, most consistently for their demised online magazine, V3.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jane Smith21 November 2008 at 13:30

    I'm sure I recognise your name in that context, but wonder if I was involved in the industry a little earlier than you?

    I worked mostly for Argos Press Software, and for TelecomSoft: my friend, the infamous Jane Cavanagh, who I worked with for some years, went on to form SCI and make her own personal fortune while I became a writer and made naff-all. I write for the satisfaction now, and the irony.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Brian Clegg21 November 2008 at 17:59

    It's all in the fuzzy past! I wrote from PC Week from around 1993 and V3 was around 1996, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Martin Fenner21 November 2008 at 21:47

    Byte was another very popular and influential magazine that stopped print publication (in 1998).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Brian Clegg22 November 2008 at 11:18

    Absolutely. Byte was for the real, roll up your sleeves and manipulate bits by hand experience.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
122 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more