PC Magazine

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PC Magazine

Editor	Jim Louderback
Categories	Computer magazine
Frequency	Bi-weekly, Bi-monthly (Philippines)
First Issue	January 1982
Company	Ziff-Davis
Country	United States,Serbia,Mexico Brazil, Thailand,Singapore China,Turkey,Netherlands Belgium,Middle East, Greece Russia, Israel, Philippines
Language	English,Spanish Thai, Chinese, Serbian Portuguese, Greek, Arabic, Dutch
Website	www.pcmag.com
ISSN	0888-8507

PC Magazine (or PC Mag) is a computer magazine published biweekly (except in January and July) both in print and online. The magazine is published by Ziff-Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. The first edition was released in January 1982 as a monthly called PC (the "Magazine" was not added to the logo until the first major redesign in January 1986). The magazine moved to biweekly publication in 1983 after a single monthly issue swelled to more than 800 pages.

The magazine's editor-in-chief, Jim Louderback, ascended to his current post in 2005. Michael J. Miller, who had held that post since 1991, took the new title of Chief Content Officer.

1 Overview
2 Development and evolution
3 Alternative methods of publication
4 Trivia
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Overview

PC Magazine provides reviews and previews of the latest hardware and software for the information technology professional. Articles are written by leading experts such as John C. Dvorak, whose regular column and Inside Track feature are among the magazine's most popular attractions. Other regular departments include columns by Michael J. Miller (Forward Thinking), Bill Machrone, and Jim Louderback, as well as:

First Looks (a collection of reviews of newly-released products),
Pipeline (a collection of short articles and snippets on computer-industry developments),
Solutions (which includes various how-to articles),
User-to-User (a section in which the magazine's experts answer user-submitted questions),
After Hours (a section about various computer entertainment products; the designation "After Hours" is a legacy of the magazine's traditional orientation towards business computing), and
Abort, Retry, Fail? (a beginning-of-the-magazine humor page which for a few years was known as Backspace--and was subsequently the last page).

[edit] Development and evolution

The magazine has evolved significantly over the years. The most drastic change has been the shrinkage of the publication due to contractions in the computer-industry ad market and the easy availability of the Internet, which has tended to make computer magazines less "necessary" than they once were. Where once mail-order vendors had huge listing of products in ads covering several pages, there is now a single page with a reference to a website. At one time (the 1980s through the mid-1990s), the magazine averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even 600-page marks. In the late 1990s, as the computer-magazine field underwent a drastic pruning, the magazine shrank to 300-something and then 200-something pages.

Today, the magazine runs about 150 pages an issue. It has adapted to the new realities of the 21st century by reducing its once-standard emphasis on massive comparative reviews of computer systems, hardware peripherals, and software packages to focus more on the broader consumer-electronics market (including cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital cameras, and so on). Since the late 1990s, the magazine has taken to reviewing Mac software and hardware, which at one time would have been unthinkable.

PC Magazine has consistently positioned itself as the leading source of information about PCs and PC-related products, and its development and evolution have mirrored those of computer journalism in general. The magazine practically invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews in 1984 with a groundbreaking "Project Printers" issue. For many years thereafter, the blockbuster annual printer issue, featuring more than 100 reviews, was a PC Magazine tradition.

The publication also took on a series of editorial causes over the years, including copy protection (the magazine refused to grant its coveted Editors' Choice award to any product that used copy protection) and the "brain-dead" 286 (then-editor-in-chief Bill Machrone said the magazine would still review 286s but would not recommend them).

PC Magazine was a booster of early versions of the OS/2 operating system in the late 1980s, but then switched to a strong endorsement of the Microsoft Windows operating environment after the release of Windows 3.0 in May 1990. Some OS/2 users accused of the magazine of ignoring OS/2 2.x versions and later.

During the dot-com boom, the magazine began focusing heavily on many of the new Internet businesses, prompting complaints from some readers that the magazine was abandoning its original emphasis on computer technology. After the collapse of the technology bubble in the early 2000s, the magazine returned to a more traditional approach.

[edit] Alternative methods of publication

The online edition began in late 1994 and started producing a digital edition of the magazine through Zinio in 2004. For some years in the late 1990s, a CD-ROM version containing interactive reviews and the full text of back issues was available.

There was also a special "Network Edition" of the print magazine from 1993 to 1997. This evolved into "Net Tools," which was part of the general press run, and the current "Internet User" and "Internet Business" sections.

Numerous books have been published under the "PC Magazine" designation, as well. John C. Dvorak's name has also appeared on many books.

[edit] Trivia

PC Magazine's most famous gaffe occurred in January 1989 when the annual Technical Excellence Award was rendered on the cover as "Technichal Excellence. Hilarious."

PC Magazine's creator, David Bunnell, is also the creator of PC Magazine's biggest rival PC World.

PC Magazine was responsible for the development of PC Labs, which was the first comprehensive laboratory for benchmarking software and hardware. The "lab" workers even wore white coats in the beginning.

The magazine has undergone four major redesigns in its history, in January 1986, June 1989, July 1992, and February 2000. The original "PC" logo, which was replaced by a variation similar to the current one in 1986, resembled an old-fashioned dot-matrix printout.

The Editors' Choice award was known as the Editor's Choice award until many people complained that the latter was grammatically incorrect.

The PC Magazine utilities began as printed lines of code in the back pages of the magazine. Users were expected to type this code into editors and compile it themselves. When PC Magazine launched its Web site, and for some years thereafter, the utilities were available for free download, but now they are distributed on a paid-for basis.

PC Magazine was once known for its colorful three-dimensional bar graphs, which were considered visually attractive but allegedly also confusing. The graphs were abandoned in the 1992 redesign.

From its inception in mid-1987 to the June 1989 redesign, the After Hours section was printed "backwards" in that the first page of the section was actually the last page of the magazine. This had the advantage of allowing a person to flip the book over, open the back cover, and begin reading the reviews in their logical order.

For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, PC Magazine ran a proprietary online service on CompuServe called PC MagNet. This was an offshoot of an earlier effort called the PC Magazine Interactive Reader Service.

For many years, the magazine's Pipeline and now-defunct Trends section listed the top-10 and then top-15 best-selling software packages. From 1988 to 1992, this list was conveyed through a colorful but bizarre bar-graph display that included lines tracking the five-week selling history of each package. In the March 1997 15th-anniversary issue, an editor admitted that "we didn't understand it either."

The magazine was once so thick that it included an index of advertisements and a separate index of advertisers in addition to an index of editorial reviews. These indices were in addition to the standard table-of-contents at the front of the magazine.

To commemorate the launch of IBM's PS/2 machines in the summer of 1987, PC Magazine ran a playful cover with the name "PS" Magazine.

During the 1980s, the magazine's writers and editors used the XyWrite III word processor, even though the official Editors' Choice award went to WordPerfect. (For several years in the mid-1980s, the magazine divided its blockbuster word processor reviews into different sections for "professional," "corporate," and "personal" word processors.)

John C. Dvorak's column is probably the most popular feature of the magazine, and messages from his fans and detractors have been a constant presence in the Letters section since the mid-1980s.

For a while PC Magazine was known to misspell consistently Apple's 'i' products; "iMac" would be spelled 'Imac', 'iPod' as 'Ipod' and so on. Whether this was a deliberate action isn't known.