The Golden Age of InfoWorld Covers, 1984-1985

Return with us now to the days when Radio Shack was a PC giant, Apple was on the ropes, and people thought laptops were a foolish fad.

Posted by  | Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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“Software Swamps Mac Development”

August 12th, 1985

That headline doesn’t make much sense to me, but it’s for another bleak story about Apple. The piece says that the Mac is too closed and hasn’t evolved fast enough, and that it needs more applications. It quotes an analyst as saying that Commodore’s Amiga might overtake the Mac, and the most optimistic thing that the guy in charge of Mac software at Microsoft says is that Apple is “not dead yet.”

In a separate story, Steve Jobs–no longer in charge of the Mac, but still at Apple–tells InfoWorld that Apple’s sales woes are due to the sluggish economy.  A month later, he would resign and announce he was starting a new company, NeXT.

More tech nostalgia at Technologizer:

The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History

Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost

Brilliant but Doomed: Technology’s Most Magnificent Failures

The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time



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Slides: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

5 Comments For This Post

  1. Stilgar Says:

    Cool. As I recall, Apple was actually more profitable after Steve Jobs left. It didn’t last long though. 🙂

  2. Matthew Says:

    Love the sidebar on #9 – it says “Businesses can buy software electronically.” And that was news then!

  3. Michael Swaine Says:

    But the Google Books collection only seems to go back to late 1986. What about the 1981-1986 issues? Are they adding gradually? Or should I help them out with my back-issue collection?

  4. Cassie Maas Says:

    I remember your writing Michael!

  5. Wade Watson Says:

    These were from the later period of Infoworld for me. When I first subscribed it was more of a tabloid style with a newspaper-style cover. Anybody could get a subscription for free if you said you were a business. Every issue was worth reading if for nothing else John Dvorak’s column. Before he was a podcast cramugin he was the go-to guy for tech scoops. Albeit, he pretty much had that field to himself back then.

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    […] I took a look back at tech of the early 1980s, in the form of old InfoWorld covers. […]