The first issue of Creative Computing was dated November–December 1974, and it was not about home computers. David Ahl’s new bimonthly was for schools. Its opening editorial asked whether the classroom needed a computer at all, its contents ran from “Statewide Computer Pools” to a new BASIC game called “Depth Charge”, and its editors and contributors were teachers and students, many of them listed at addresses in Massachusetts. A box on one page pleaded: “Recruit a new subscriber for CREATIVE COMPUTING today! We need 3278 more subscribers to break even!” Eleven years later the magazine was a glossy monthly owned by Ziff-Davis, and Ahl used his last editorial to tell readers it was closing.
Fast facts
- Founded: first issue November–December 1974, from P.O. Box 789-M, Morristown, New Jersey.
- Founder, publisher and editor-in-chief: David H. Ahl.
- Frequency: bimonthly to 1978; monthly from January 1979.
- Readership: “nearly 100,000 circulation”, by the magazine’s own advertising in 1980 and 1981.
- Owners: Ideametrics, then Creative Computing; from mid-1982 Ahl Computing, Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis.
- Last issue: December 1985.
For teachers first
The first issue described itself as a magazine for “students and educators”, with “between 48 and 72 pages of editorial material” in each issue. Its masthead listed a Higher Education Editor from Dartmouth College and a Problems Editor from Lexington High School, and it advertised for volunteer editors, including a Computer Games Editor who “must have access to BASIC with very good quality printing terminal”. Ahl’s opening editorial argued that most maths and science students “don’t really know what it’s all about”, and that the magazine should “focus attention on these needs, sharpen our awareness of them, and result in action”. It was also, the issue said, “a forum for the discussion of the social impact of the computer”, from privacy to jobs and pollution control.
The first three years were collected as The Best of Creative Computing, and a 1986 advertisement for the books gives a fair picture of what those years held: “a scholarly discussion of the effect of computers in schools, a cartoon strip by R. Crumb, a classic comparison of sorting methods”, a story by Isaac Asimov about his fictional computer Multivac, “and, oh yes, over 50 original games in Basic!” The same advertisement called Creative Computing “the oldest of all the personal computing magazines”, pointing out that BYTE’s first issue came “nearly a year later”.
Games in BASIC
Games were part of the magazine from the start. The first issue printed a sample run of “Depth Charge”, in which the player guessed the position of a submarine in three dimensions until the teletype printed “B O O M ! !”. Ahl’s company also published the games as books. Creative Computing advertised 101 BASIC Computer Games in BYTE in July 1976 as “a collection of 101 games in BASIC, each one with a complete listing, sample run, and write-up”, and BASIC Computer Games, the microcomputer edition of 1978, carried the line “Copyright © 1978 by Creative Computing”. By February 1981 the magazine claimed combined sales of over 500,000 for that book and its sequel, More Basic Computer Games. One of the best-known listings it printed was The Oregon Trail, which Don Rawitsch wrote up for the May–June 1978 issue (see Type-in Listings).
A monthly for the microcomputer
By 1980 the magazine had become a thick monthly, edited from 39 East Hanover Avenue in Morris Plains, New Jersey, and its pages show the industry taking shape. In July 1980 Marc Blank and S. W. Galley of Infocom explained how they fitted Zork onto home computers, introducing the “Z-machine” (see Z-machine). In September 1980 a show report told readers that Space Invaders had been the fastest-selling cartridge for the Atari VCS and that Atari had sued Activision. In December 1980 Ahl interviewed Clive Sinclair, who said the ZX80 had been developed between March 1979 and February 1980, and the same issue reprinted Personal Computer World’s review of the machine. A year later the magazine reported from Seymour Papert’s Logo workshop in New York and interviewed Joel Billings of Strategic Simulations.
The staff list was unusual too. Ted Nelson, who was designing a “hypertext” system he called Xanadu, was the magazine’s editor through 1980 and editor-at-large in 1981, and described Xanadu in its pages. The futurist Alvin Toffler was a contributing editor. Every April, starting in 1980, the magazine let itself go: its April 1980 issue carried a “Giant 73-page April Fool’s Parody of 13 Computer Magazines”, Dr. Kilobyte’s Creative Popular Personal Recreational Microcomputer Data Interface World Journal, with its pages numbered in hexadecimal.
Ahl built a small publishing house around the magazine. In February 1981 it advertised SYNC, a magazine for owners of the Sinclair ZX80, as “a Creative Computing publication”, and described Creative Computing as “the number 1 magazine of software and applications with nearly 100,000 circulation”. Creative Computing Press published books, and the same advertisement said Creative Computing Software made “over 150 software packages for six different personal computers”.
Ziff-Davis
In June 1982 the masthead changed. The magazine was now “published monthly by Ahl Computing, Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company”, with Ahl as president; the May issue had still been published by Creative Computing. Ahl stayed in charge, and the new owner added titles: Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games, published three times a year by Ahl Computing, appeared in 1983. Bob Libes, the founder of Microsystems, a magazine Ahl had bought into, told Computer Language in 1985 that “when hard times fell on Ahl he sold Creative Computing to Ziff-Davis Publishing”, and that Microsystems “was part of the deal”.
The last issue
The December 1985 issue opened with an editorial by Ahl titled “Great while it lasted”:
Faced with mounting losses and declining advertising pages, Ziff-Davis has decided to cease publication of Creative Computing. We are hoping to find a buyer for the magazine; if none is found this will be the last issue.
Subscribers were offered “a computer magazine of your choice” for the rest of their subscriptions. Ahl spent the rest of the page on the state of the industry, from “user hostile” machines that kept new buyers away to the cost of launching a product, which he reckoned had grown “several orders of magnitude” in four or five years. No buyer was found, and December 1985 was the last issue.
Creative Computing was not alone. 80 Micro wrote in March 1986 that “1985 wasn’t a good year for computer magazines”, naming Computers & Electronics, Creative Computing and Popular Computing as the biggest losses. Its columnist Eric Maloney was not a fan: “Creative Computing never appealed to me; it felt too much like a comic book.” In 1986 a mail-order firm in Morristown, Creative Closeouts, advertised that “when closing up Creative Computing, we discovered a small stash” of the company’s books, and offered the last 47 sets of The Best of Creative Computing for $10.
Scans of the magazine’s run, from the first issue to the last, are now freely readable in the Internet Archive.
Sources
- Creative Computing vol. 1 no. 1, November–December 1974: masthead (Ahl as editor-in-chief and publisher; Ideametrics; Morristown; subscription prices), editorial, contents, “Depth Charge”, the call for volunteer editors, the subscriber appeal and the statement of aims. https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n01NovemberDecember1974
- Creative Computing vol. 2 no. 2, March–April 1976, and vol. 3 no. 1, January–February 1977: mastheads (Ideametrics; then Creative Computing).
- Creative Computing vol. 6 no. 4, April 1980: contents (“Giant 73-page April Fool’s Parody of 13 Computer Magazines”, hexadecimal page numbers) and the parody section.
- Creative Computing vol. 6 no. 7, July 1980, pp. 80–88 (Blank and Galley); vol. 6 no. 9, September 1980, pp. 16–18 (show report); vol. 6 no. 12, December 1980 (masthead with Ted Nelson as editor; Nelson on Xanadu; Tebbutt’s ZX80 review, pp. 28–34; Ahl’s interview with Clive Sinclair, p. 108); vol. 7 no. 12, December 1981 (Eyster on Papert’s workshop; Ahl’s interview with Joel Billings, pp. 92–94). Further detail in the entries linked above.
- Creative Computing vol. 7 no. 2, February 1981: masthead (Ted Nelson as editor-at-large; Alvin Toffler as a contributing editor; editorial office at Morris Plains) and the SYNC advertisement (“nearly 100,000 circulation”; Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games, “combined sales over 500,000”). The December 1980 issue carries the same circulation claim.
- BYTE issue 11, July 1976: Creative Computing advertisement for 101 BASIC Computer Games.
- David H. Ahl (ed.), BASIC Computer Games, microcomputer edition (Workman, 1978): copyright line.
- Creative Computing vol. 8 no. 5, May 1982, and vol. 8 no. 6, June 1982: mastheads (Creative Computing; then Ahl Computing, Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis). https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1982-06
- Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games vol. 1 no. 1, September 1983: masthead (Ahl Computing, a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis).
- Computer Language issue 5, January 1985: profile of Bob Libes (Microsystems, Ahl, and the sale to Ziff-Davis).
- Creative Computing vol. 11 no. 12, December 1985: masthead and David Ahl’s editorial, “Great while it lasted”. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1985-12
- 80 Micro, March 1986, p. 8: Eric Maloney, “Side Tracks” (“Magazine Massacre” and the table of defunct magazines).
- Atari Explorer, October 1986: Creative Closeouts advertisements (The Best of Creative Computing, “the oldest of all the personal computing magazines”, the first issue in November 1974).
- Internet Archive, Creative Computing scans (web, secondary). https://archive.org/search?query=creative+computing+magazine