22 years ago my home computing experience was defined by my eldest brother's Commodore 64, along with an old flat-keyboard Atari 400 (take a look at that keyboard. Imagine spending hours typing in entire applications, your fingers pulsing in pain. Now imagine your neighbour curiously pushing the button that opens the cartridge cover, an action which hilariously also turns off the power. That happens to be a very destructive act when you have no persistent storage). Primary school computing consisted of programming stick figures bouncing o's on Commodore PETs.

These were pretty exciting times in personal computing, with seemingly endless potential, and a wide range of publications had appeared to cater to the burgeoning market. One of the most successful of which was Compute!, a magazine that stood apart by being largely platform agnostic (versus the rags that catered to a specific zeal, advocating why, for instance, the Ti-99/4a was the greatest computer ever).

I headed to the library monthly to read each issue, eager to see what new innovations were happening in the industry. These scans are from the February 1984 issue (if you're price comparing with today, note that the CPI inflation since 1984 is 1.86x), one of many that I bought on eBay some time back to use as office wall art, as obviously this was a very shaping period of my life.

Each Compute! issue featured one or more type-in game or application (as did most other home computing magazines), often ported to several platform. Sometimes they were BASIC, while other times it was a BASIC loader followed by pages of machine language. Fun times, and I have a great memory of some of these games. I also have memories of spending hours typing in a game to have it lock up when we went to run it.

These type-in applications were actually my original motivation for learning to program. My dream was to eventually submit my own application, imagining the glory of having thousands of people across the land typing my work into their computers. I would be a hero to people everywhere!

Of course the whole type-in fad faded before I had a chance for such illustrious glory. For a short while there was a standard for printing programs as 2D barcode patterns, and with the appropriate scanner you could scan it right off the page. Neat idea, but some technical difficulties kept it from taking off.

Several trends seem obvious looking through this magazine. Educational software of all sorts was a huge market in those days (and it seemed to be the greatest intended use for home computers), with Spinnaker being one of the largest vendors.

And of course there were games. SSI was a significant publisher of games, featuring several ads in every issue. Though they originally started as a wargame company (hence the Strategic Simulations company moniker), they began generalizing into all sorts of (mostly terrible) games.

It's also evident that the still struggling "everyone will be a programmer" philosophy was strong. BASIC, for instance, was intended as a language that everyone would use to achieve their computing needs -- certainly not as the primary language of many corporate developers -- with the whole family writing programs to do what they needed to get done.

CompuServe was the dominant pre-Internet, allowing users in several countries to communicate, participate in discussions, and even play primitive multiplayer online games. Of course it was insanely expensive, so I stuck to local BBSs.

And of course one of the most interesting sections of these sorts of magazines were the mail-order shop ads (a trend that reached its pinnacle with Computer Shopper several years late -- 800 pages, 99% of which were full-page ads).

I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, or in many cases pre-memory lane. I had to scan these images anyways, so I figured I might as well share. I've stuck to ads -- rather than actual magazine content -- to avoid copyright issues.