12 great dead tech mags (and my own history as reader and Grim Reaper)

In requiem for once-mighty PC Magazine's decision to stop printing and go Web-only, the Technologizer blog's Harry McCracken writes elegantly today about his 12 favorite departed computer magazines.

For anyone like me who has read their fair share of tech magazines over the years (and if you're reading this, you probably have), this is a great walk down memory lane by McCracken, who is the former editor of PC World but has also written for many of the pubs on this list.

It's no surprise that so many magazines have come and gone. The tech industry is as flighty and unstable as the fashion industry (even if the buyers are completely opposite).

As platforms like the Commodore 64 or TRS-80 went away, publishers tried to morph pubs to maintain their painstakingly-acquired subscriber lists. Popular Electronics became Computers and Electronics. PC/Computing changed into Ziff Davis Smart Business for the New Economy. Computer Gaming World morphed into Games for Windows. As McCracken points out, it never worked.

I was a big fan of PC Magazine in its heyday, even if the reviews seemed to be done on the same generous curve that Rolling Stone employed for its album reviews. PC Magazine always seemed like a better buy at the drug store newsstand, being fatter with product ads than rival PC World.

I also enjoyed sneaking the Byte magazines piled high in my pal Eric Fang's Oakland apartment. The explanatory features were always illuminating, and the Jerry Pournelle columns were less predictably cranky than PC Mag's John Dvorak, and thus, more interesting. Going further back, as a teenage Apple II+ owner, I used to eagerly type in the BASIC programs from the pages of Nibble.

But the dead magazines that influenced me the most were the victims of the last downturn. In order, they were: Upside, Red Herring, Yahoo! Internet Life and the Industry Standard.

I'm not ashamed to say the publications I worked for in Hong Kong in the second half of the 1990s were slavishly derivative of those magazines. The Dataphile (1992-1998) was started by my old boss Larry Campbell as a Boardwatch-type BBS hobbyist magazine before morphing during my watch into a cyberculture pub with a business edge that befitted Hong Kong.

Reality set in during the Asian economic crisis of 97-98, and The Dataphile became a trade magazine, ala Network World, before shuttering.

I also ran something called IT Daily (1990?-1998), which was a tech newsletter affiliated with the long-running Newsbytes News Service (1983-2002), which U.S. readers probably remember.

My record as the bearer of bad luck continued. I ran the South China Morning Post's technology section during the dot-boom. The newspaper survives, of course, but the PC mag was killed and the Tech Post news section folded into Business after a few years after the dot-crash.

A public radio program, Pacific Time, where I was a producer, closed last year. And the East Bay Business Times (1998-2008) closed a month ago.

So history is not on my side. But for too many reasons to list, I don't expect Computerworld or our parent, IDG, to have the same fate.

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Ever read (or worked for!) any of the fine media outlets mentioned above? Miss 'em? And where would you go today for the same content?