Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Free online issues of Compute! magazine
By James Grahame
Compute! was a fantastic computer hobbyist magazine published between 1979 through 1994. Its hallowed pages covered Atari, Apple, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Timex/Sinclair, and many other early personal computers.
It is getting difficult to find vintage copies, but the Classic Computer Magazine Archive features the text of hundreds of vintage articles from this magazine and others. You won't find every issue online, but Kevin Savetz just contacted us to point out that the full text of 21 more issues is now online, including the Fall 1979 premiere.
The only downfall of the archive is that it doesn't include pictures or classic ads (and lusting after ludicriously high-tech gear
was half the fun). What's immediately evident is the scope and relative complexity of the articles: "PET Cassette Format Revisited", "Atari Video Graphics And The New GTIA" and page-turners like "Recursive BASIC Subroutines." Definitely worth retrosurfing!
Index of Compute! articles
