Industry magazines

[Enzo]

Used to be many of them, but now not so much. Popular Electronics was probably the most popular, but there were other good ones.

In any case, this web site linked below has scans of a great many of them. Check them out.

American Radio History: Documents from the History of Radio TV and FM broadcasting and Electronics

I am mainly interested in the stuff scrolling down to Consumer Electronics and further down.

[Mick Bailey]

I started to read through some of those mags last night - so interesting that I completely forgot about eating biscuits, peanuts and cheese. Some interesting guitar-related stuff in the hobby mags.

There's an interesting relationship between the web and printed material; the printed stuff has survived for so long and is being perpetuated and disseminated through the web, yet the web itself as a publishing medium is transient. In some cases the only reference to older web-published material is that someone printed it out. I have some camera stuff I printed off about 20 years ago and there's now no trace to be found on the web.

You can find a magazine from (say) 1993, but show me a web site from then. It will be interesting to see if there's any kind of durability of information. My radio magazines from the 1930s are still readable today. Will any of the material published on the web still persist in 87 years? Doesn't really affect me, as I'll be as dead as Harvey Weinstein's career. But interesting to speculate.

[Enzo]

What inspired me to write this thread was that the paper copy of that magazine was (and is) sitting next to me here. I found that issue so outrageous I kept it, all my other back issues are gone.

My local library growing up took popular electronics, electronics world, QST, and some others. I could read them for free. The library also had one of the first coin operated copiers. 25 cents a page, not so cheap in the 1950s. The copies came out in negative. Printed on paper, but the image of a printed page was white letters on black,. I still have a few schematics I copied that way. One I wanted to build but never did was a spectrum analyzer. I was into short wave, and it would have let me see the radio signals across the band. A tube circuit, and more complex than anything I had done.

[dbdoc]

Electronics Servicing and Technology (ES&T) was my favorite. They were heavy into consumer tvs and vcrs, including schematics. They were a godsend when the first SMPSs came out. I wish they were still around when the first flat-panel tvs came out.
Where I worked was home of the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology. I think they had every Sam"s Photo Facts in existence. Their first copiers were a dime a copy. You would always see techs occupying the tables near the Sam"s, deep into it.

[Enzo]

I got ES&T for years, used to save the centerfold schematics. I got into many spats with the guy who wrote their quizzes, Sam something maybe? SO often there were typos or wrong images in the quizzes. They had the write-in forum in the back where guys asked questions and others answered them. A forerunner to forums like this one.