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 Harry McCracken | Wednesday, February 3, 2010
“The Company That Made Software Easy to Use”
Anyone who remembers software in the 1980s at all remembers giants such as Ashton-Tate, Borland, Lotus, WordPerfect, and an outfit called  Microsoft, but Software Publishing Corp. (SPC) was a major name that’s been largely forgotten. (It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry of its own.) Back in the day, its PFS: line of productivity apps were well-regarded bestsellers–as evidenced by the praise InfoWorld lavished on SPC in this cover story.
The magazine is also impressed by TeleVideo’s new transportable computer–“transportable” meaning that it weighed a mere 32 pounds.
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I Love the Eighties! Says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:57 am[…] View The Golden Age of InfoWorld Covers slide show. […]
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And That’s What You Missed on Technologizer Says:
December 31st, 2010 at 12:34 pm[…] I took a look back at tech of the early 1980s, in the form of old InfoWorld covers. […]
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:42 am
Cool. As I recall, Apple was actually more profitable after Steve Jobs left. It didn’t last long though. 🙂
February 3rd, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Love the sidebar on #9 – it says “Businesses can buy software electronically.” And that was news then!
February 4th, 2010 at 8:50 am
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?
June 29th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
I remember your writing Michael!
February 5th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
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.