COMPUTE MAGAZINE RETURNS!

Yes, with exhorbitant $5 shipping for a $10 magazine.  Not a good start...

mreg376 wrote:

Yes, with exhorbitant $5 shipping for a $10 magazine.  Not a good start...

It isn't the 1980s any more.

Have you looked at what real shipping costs are these days?  Everyone complains about vendors and publishers charging a lot, but in a lot of cases there is little to no markup on the shipping and they have to cover any envelopes/wrapping and labor for mailing to their costs.

True, but the magazine rate (USPS periodical mail) for one magazine is far less than $5.00, and there are no envolopes and wrapping.  They are making money on the shipping.  Costs associated with getting their prodicts ready to sell should go into the product price.     

mreg376 wrote:

True, but the magazine rate (USPS periodical mail) for one magazine is far less than $5.00, and there are no envolopes and wrapping.  They are making money on the shipping.  Costs associated with getting their prodicts ready to sell should go into the product price.     

Well, they're up front about the total cost, it isn't like they are hiding anything.  I'm not sure how much it matters that much whether they charge for the shipping or not.  If they just gave the total price and didn't split the tax and shipping out would that be better?  Most places that have "free shipping" just bundle it into the price and you don't know how much they are charging for it.  If you don't think it is worth $15.95 then don't buy it.  Or the digital only subscription is significantly less.  They've got to make their money somewhere otherwise they won't bother to publish.

I understand.  I'm sure I'll buy it anyway.  Or at least one.  $120 a year is a bit steep for a magazine, unless it is particulary useful.  It seems like many of the forum members here (including you) could write it! 

Edit: Actually since Compute Gazette was orignally for the C64, it also remains to be seen how much other retro comuting they will cover, which is what they are promising.  

mreg376 wrote:

I understand.  I'm sure I'll buy it anyway.  Or at least one.  $120 a year is a bit steep for a magazine, unless it is particulary useful.  It seems like many of the forum members here (including you) could write it! 

Edit: Actually since Compute Gazette was orignally for the C64, it also remains to be seen how much other retro comuting they will cover,

I agree that it is pretty expensive.  But what isn't these days.  Juiced.GS is really about the only other Apple II mag out there and it's $21/yr shipped.  That's actually pretty cheap, I can't imagine that Ken is making a whole lot from it.  Advertising in it is even cheap.

I haven't written anything in years.  Back in the day I had a few articles published here and there but I'm not really much of a writer. Being a Software Engineer English was always my worst subject in school and I pretty much consider myself to be more or less functionally illiterate.  That said, academic standards seem to have lowered over the years.

Even the main Compute! was always more Commodore orriented, but covered a little other stuff including occasional Apple II content.   It will be interested to see what they do with it.

For retro, probably as far as Apple goes, Apple-1, Apple ][ to IIgs, Apple /// and 68k Macs.  And clones.

For Commodore, KIM, PET/CBM, VIC-20, C64/C128 and Commodore produced Amigas.  Plus the few other weird and obscure 8 bit ones like Plus-4, etc.  Maybe even their XT and 286 clones.

For Atari 400/800, XL line and ST line.

TRS-80 Model 1/2/3/4, CoCo line, PC clones up to 286.

TI 99/4, 99/4A

Other 6502 and Z80 machines...  Altair, IMSAI and other S-100 systems, BBC, SOL-20, Timex/Sinclair, etc., VTech Laser 200/300, etc.

PC/PC-XT and PC-AT clones.  Basically I'd cut it off at the 16 bit 286 and NEC V20/30 level machines. 

I'm probably forgetting huge numbers.  Oh, SWTPC 6800 too.

But yeah, no consoles, they have their own publications.  About the closest thing maybe the Coleco Adam.

That's a pretty wide open enough target to have sufficient material and interest I'd think.

Khaibitgfx wrote:

I'd go as far as the 386 in the PC arena.

I'd cut it off at the 286  primarily because by the time of the 386 pretty much all the clones were generic and there was little or no differnce between any brands other than IBM trying to proprietarize things with the PS/2, which turned into a flop as the rest of the industry went with things like VL Bus, EISA and eventually PCI.  Pretty much even most of the 286 offerings were pretty generic PC-AT clones.  But there was a lot of overlap in the timespan of hte 8088/8086, 80186 and NEC V20/V30 and the 80286.

Plus it fits with making the cut-off between retro and modern the transition betwen 16 bit and 32 bit.  Although now just about everythng has been 64 bit for a long time.  The only thing that slowed the 32 bit to 64 bit transittion was Microsoft being so slow to the party.  They lagged behind Linux, the BSDs and the proprietary UNIXes by 5-10 years due to the inherent design flaws in most Microsoft products being too closely tied to x86.

Khaibitgfx wrote:

Every IBM compatible was generic if you ask me, made in Taiwan anyone? Lol

Even though I never kept all the computers I had oʻver the past few decades, I did manage to keep most of the cpus and cards, even strange ones from cyrix. Mind you my oldest card is still a 1978 Apple card for dem der floppy drives.

 

 

Early on there were not-quite-IBM compatibles like the DEC Rainbow, Tandy 2000, TI Professional, HP-150, Zenith Z100 and others.  They mostly used 8088 or 8086 chips, sometimes something like a 80186 or NEC V20/V30.  They ran MS-DOS (or CP/M 86) but they wouldn't run the "definitive" IBM PC programs, or at least required special versions or patches to do so.  The programs people used for compatibility tests were mainly Lotus 1-2-3 and SubLogic (later Microsoft) Flight Simulator.  Most of those not-quite clones that weren't completely generic were actually better in many ways than a "real" IBM PC, but because they were not 100% compatible they all disappeared from the market fairly quickly as the compatible clones came to dominate the market and eventually squeeze even IBM out.  It is sad that so often compatibility won over innovation.

Khaibitgfx wrote:

Some might say innovation without compatibility isn't very innovative, but I get what you're saying.

If the IIGS came out with Amiga like capabilities back in the day, but sacrificed compatibility with the previous IIs, would you buy it?

 

Maybe, if the capabilities were worth the sacrifice.  Most people at the time bought completely incompatible systems when they switched from 8 bit systems to 16 bit systems.  There was basically zero compatibility for people moving from CP/M to MS-DOS, from C64 to Amiga, from Atari 400/800 to Atari ST.  From Apple II to Mac,  Apple was actually one of the few companies that came out with a 16 bit system that was somewhat compatible with their 8 bit line.

In the case of the MS-DOS but not IBM PC compatible machines like the ones I mentioned, it was different companies trying to build their own systems to compete with IBM much like CP/M companies (several of those companies like Zenith previously built CP/M machines) did.  Clones of the Apple II were out there, but by then Apple was already aggressively trying to block them from the market.  They were able to do that largely because most of the clones copied protected IP like the Apple ROM images.  Eventually VTech and Franklin largely got around that by "clean room" developed compatible code.  IBM made the mistake though, that they didn't control much of the ROM, only the very basic BIOS and boot code.  It didn't take long for cloners to build clean room compatible code for that too, which the 2nd generation of clones after the initial incompatible ones used.  The MS BASIC and MS-DOS IBM packaged was controlled by Microsoft who gleefully sold it to anyone who wanted to buy it.

Those were complicated and interesting times.  Up to the genericization of clones, even the early MS-DOS machines had their own personalities and unique features.  That's pretty much all disappeared.  Even Mac hardware was kind of generic during the early PPC days when Apple allowed clones and then sort of again during their Intel CPU period, which "Hackintosh" builds were possible.  Now of course Apple has moved to their own ARM licensed silicon and effectively blocked cloners.

But basically there are only two hardware architectures left standing.  Mac and x86 PC clone.  Microsoft has never been successful for very long with Windows on any non-x86 platform so effectively the only choices there are Intel or AMD.  In the 8 bit and 16 bit eras there were literally dozens of different architectures.  It just isn't the same.