Creative Computing (magazine)

Prior to starting Creative Computing, in the early 1970s David H. Ahl was working in the educational department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he started publication of their Edu newsletter in the spring of 1971.[2] He was surprised to find that the number of subscribers, which reached 20,000 after 18 months, was much larger than the 2,000 or 3,000 he predicted based on the number of DEC machines in educational settings. He found that many subscribers did not have a DEC machine but were using Edu as a source of general information on computers in educational settings. This began his earliest thoughts about a non-DEC magazine aimed at this market.[3]

On February 22, 1973, Ahl was let go during a downsizing at DEC. But before he received his last paycheck, he was hired by a different department to help develop new low-end versions of the DEC minicomputer line. During this period he collected many user submissions to Edu and convinced DEC to publish 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973.[3] This was a hit, and eventually ran three publishing runs; July 1973, April 1974, and March 1975.[4]

By 1974, the team had produced two new designs, a PDP-8 combined with a VT50 terminal, and a briefcase-sized version of the PDP-8 with a small floppy disk. When these were personally canceled by Ken Olsen with the statement that "I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own"[3] Ahl quit DEC and took a position at AT&T.[3]

It was at this point that Ahl decided to move ahead with the educational-focused magazine. Reasoning that the educational market would be of interest to public foundations and many companies, Ahl sent funding proposals to over a hundred companies and received nothing.[2] Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.[2][lower-alpha 1]

Instead of printing 850 copies, Ahl split the subscription money in two; he kept one half for future operations, and used the other half to print as many copies of the new magazine as he could. This allowed for the printing of 8,000 copies of the first edition, which were completed on 7 October 1974. The subscribers were sent their copies first, but the rest were sent for free to a wide variety of companies, libraries and schools. He followed the same pattern for the next three issues.[5] The trick worked, and subscriptions began to pour in.[6] During this period the magazine was based in Morristown, New Jersey.

Back of the April 1980 issue, with a parody of other computer magazines

By August 1975 the magazine had 2,500 subscribers. In January, the Altair 8800 had been announced and Ahl began looking for new authors who could write for the exploding microcomputer market. By 1976 the content was roughly split between the education and microcomputing market. At that point, the magazine started actively looking for advertisers and the November/December 1976 issue was the first to be printed on coated paper rather than newsprint to provide better quality ads.[5]

By 1978 the subscriptions hit 60,000, and revenue was approaching $1 million. In July 1978, Ahl quit his position at AT&T to work at Creative Computing full time. This caused friction with his wife.[7] In August, they purchased ROM magazine[lower-alpha 2] and two smaller newsletters and combined their content into the magazine. In January 1979, the magazine went monthly from bimonthly.[8]

By 1979 the magazine had outgrown the single-family home it was being run from, and Ahl looked for a larger duplex home that would allow him to live with his wife in one half and run the magazine from the other. It was at this time that Regis McKenna, the advertizing company handling Apple Computer was asked to pay an overdue advertising bill. The company provided a canceled check proving they had already done so. When they began tracking it down, the police were called and found that two people in the company had conspired to embezzle $100,000 by sending incoming cheques to a different bank. This was only discovered because one of the conspirators had forgotten to mark the bill as paid so a second invoice was sent out.[7]

When she was told the story, Ahl's wife had enough and kicked him out of the house pending a divorce. He moved into the only unused room in the other side of the building. During this time, Ted Nelson, known for the invention of hypertext, was briefly the editor. Nelson would arrive at 5 pm and work all night, waking Ahl in the bedroom when he started printing on a Qume daisy wheel printer. In October 1980 the company moved to a much larger 25,000 square feet (2,300 m²) office building.[8]

Through this period, featured writers included Robert Swirsky, David Lubar, and John J. Anderson. The magazine regularly included BASIC source code for utility programs and games, which users could manually enter into their home computers. The April issues, starting in 1980, became famous for their parodies of the major computer magazines of the time.

Larger publishers began taking note of the computer market. A watershed moment was in 1979 when McGraw-Hill purchased Byte. By 1982, most of the quality magazines had been purchased and only a few large ones remained independent, including Compute!, Interface Age, Family Computing[lower-alpha 3] and Creative Computing.[7]

Realizing they were being pushed out of the market due to the huge budgets and marketing power of these major players, in 1982 Ahl approached several potential buyers, including Atari, CBS[lower-alpha 4] and Ziff-Davis.[7] In 1983 Ahl sold the company to Ziff-Davis, which at that time published 28 different magazines. Ahl remained the Editor-in-Chief.[8][9] The magazine moved to Los Angeles, California. At their peak, the magazine reached about 500,000 subscriptions.[7]

Through the early 1980s, and especially with the launch of the IBM PC, the market began to shift from a hobby-and-educational oriented one to more and more business applications. Ziff quickly shifted the focus of the magazine to be more software-oriented, and the programming articles disappeared shortly after the sale. This attempt to refocus on business computing was not successful, and when Bill Ziff had a cancer scare in 1985 he began concentrating his businesses, selling off many of the specialty magazines. Ziff ultimately ceased publication of Creative Computing in December 1985.[9]

• Ahl, David H. (1976). "Birth of a Magazine (History of Creative Computing)". The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1. pp. 2–3.
• Anderson, John J. (November 1984). "Dave tells Ahl - the history of Creative Computing. (David Ahl's personal narrative)". Creative Computing. pp. 66–74.
• Savetz, Kevin (3 April 2013). "Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl" (Interview).