Still the silliest Steve Jobs photo ever.
Tag Archives | InfoWorld
The Golden Age of InfoWorld Covers, 1984-1985
Back in the 1980s, if you wanted to stay particularly up-to-date on the PC business, you read a newsweekly–and there was a high chance that the newsweekly you read was IDG’s InfoWorld. Among the most venerable and successful computing publications–it started in 1978 and thrives online today–InfoWorld was famous back then for its frequent format changes. In 1984 and 1985, it adopted a BusinessWeek-like look and feel. The issues from this era may not have been the best issues of InfoWorld ever, but they’re the most fun ones to revisit. (Thanks to Google Books, revisiting InfoWorld’s entire print run is now easy.)
These mid-80s covers are miniature time capsules. Here are a bunch that capture the period in all its innovative, innocent, silly glory. Click on the covers to read the issues.
(Full disclosure: I’m an InfoWorld alum, having worked there from 1992-1994. It seems like half the people I know in tech journalism are ex-InfoWorlders, such as Calendar Swamp proprietor Scott Mace, author of several of the stories here.)
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Apple Rumors: The Early Years
We live in an, um, golden age of Apple gossip. Thanks to the blogosphere, a surging sea of sites cover an endless array of rumors about the company, from ones that are right on the money to ones that are partially right to ones that aren’t right at all. The conversation spawned by the scuttlebutt has helped many a site fill time during slow news days: No other company can set off a frenzy of speculation about matters as mundane as the quantity of USB ports a new machine might sport.
The sheer quantity of Apple scuttlebutt has never been higher. But the company has been a powerful engine for the rumor mill for as long as there’s been an Apple and tech journalists to cover it. And Google Books’ recent addition of the entire run of InfoWorld provides us with the opportunity to revisit the first golden age of Apple rumors–which, uncoincidentally, ended when Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he cofounded in mid-1985.
Today’s InfoWorld may be a Web site for IT professionals, but in the early 1980s it was a weekly publication for microcomputer users, and its pages are as good a record as you’ll find of the era’s industry chatter–including lots and lots of stuff about Apple. So in this second installment in our once-in-awhile series on Apple rumors and predictions, we’ll check out tidbits from InfoWorld stories (1980-1985). My goal is not to mock, but simply to see what folks thought Apple would do, what they thought it meant…and whether any of it came to pass.