David H. Ahl | Code Like It's 198x

On 17 May 1974 David Ahl put a plan to the operations committee of Digital Equipment Corporation: two small, self-contained computers, one built into a terminal and one into a briefcase, to be sold through upmarket shops and as Heathkit kits. The engineers liked it; the salesmen did not. Ahl remembered the president, Ken Olsen, settling it: “I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own.” Ahl left DEC two months later. He took with him the rights to a book of games that DEC’s customers had sent in, and the idea for a magazine about computing that was not tied to one manufacturer. The book became BASIC Computer Games and the magazine Creative Computing.

Fast facts

Born: 1939; grew up in Malverne, on Long Island, New York.
Education: electrical engineering at Cornell University; graduate business school at Carnegie-Mellon; night courses towards a PhD in educational psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, left unfinished.
DEC: from 1969 or early 1970 (his accounts give both) to July 1974, marketing PDP-8 computers to schools; edited the newsletter EDU; compiled 101 BASIC Computer Games (DEC, 1973).
AT&T: 1974 to 1978, in education and then marketing communications, while running Creative Computing on the side.
Creative Computing: founder, publisher and editor, November 1974 to December 1985.
Later: publisher of Atari Explorer and Atarian in the late 1980s; publisher of Military Vehicles magazine from 1996.

Radio Row to DEC

Ahl’s own account, told to his magazine in 1984, starts in New York’s “Radio Row”, the street of war-surplus electronics shops cleared to build the World Trade Center. A seventh-grader from Long Island, he went there on a school photography trip in 1951 and kept going back, carrying home cardboard boxes of parts and building projects from Popular Electronics. Within six months he had a small business repairing radios. He studied electrical engineering at Cornell from 1956, where the university’s first computer arrived in 1957 and he took both of the computer courses on offer. For his fifth-year project he wrote a program to help design the acoustics of rooms. “It showed me that computers could do more than crunch numbers,” he said; “they could simulate a real-world environment.”

Simulation became his thread. At Carnegie-Mellon’s business school he helped write a management game that simulated competition in the detergent industry. After two years as an Army officer, he joined a market research consultancy in Pittsburgh and wrote models that forecast the sales of new products from consumer panel data.

At Digital Equipment Corporation he found his subject. He joined to research the minicomputer market, and moved to the PDP-8 group to sell computers to schools. Schools had three problems, as he saw them: the price, the lack of a common language and the lack of programs. He contracted outsiders to write BASIC interpreters for DEC’s machines, bundled hardware, software and books into a package he called an EduSystem, and started a newsletter, EDU, which he expected to reach two or three thousand readers and which passed 20,000 within 18 months. Readers sent in programs. “Before long, users at our first DEC installations began sending in various small, primitive games – and lots of them,” he told Wireframe in 2021. “These came mostly from students, not teachers.” The best of them, with games of his own, became 101 BASIC Computer Games, published by DEC in 1973. “In retrospect, it was a pretty crude book,” he admitted.

Creative Computing

Ahl announced the magazine in June 1974, before he had left DEC, and moved his family to Morristown, New Jersey, for a new job at AT&T. He edited articles, took photographs, drew illustrations and pasted up the pages himself. By October 1974 he had 600 subscribers. He spent half the money he had on printing 8,000 copies, filled his basement and garage with them, and spent three weeks pasting labels onto the spare 7,400 to send free to libraries and school systems. The first issue was dated November–December 1974, two months before Popular Electronics put the Altair 8800 on its cover.

The Altair changed the readership. By mid-1976 Creative Computing was writing for teachers and hobbyists at once, and in late 1976 it went to glossy paper and took advertising. By 1978 it had 60,000 readers, a third of them educators, and Ahl left AT&T in July 1978 to run the company full time. He printed the type-in games that had built his reputation, and in 1978 Creative Computing published the microcomputer edition of BASIC Computer Games, rewritten by Steve North in Microsoft BASIC. More BASIC Computer Games followed in 1979, along with books such as Computers in Mathematics: A Sourcebook of Ideas, a collection of classroom material from the magazine. He bought other titles, ROM and Microsystems, and started SYNC for owners of Sinclair computers.

Ziff-Davis bought the company in the early 1980s. Ahl stayed in charge of the magazine, but Ziff-Davis closed the software and hardware businesses, and in December 1985 it closed Creative Computing too (see Creative Computing).

The million-copy claim

Ahl has long described BASIC Computer Games as the first computer book to sell a million copies. In 1984 his magazine quoted him saying that 101 Basic Computer Games “became the first million-selling computer book ever” in 1979, and his own later biography repeats it. His own advertisement in Creative Computing in January 1981 gave a smaller figure: combined sales of BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games of “over one half million copies”. The period sources confirm the half-million, not the million.

Atari and after

From its September/October 1986 issue Ahl ran Atari Explorer, “the official Atari journal” for owners of the company’s computers, as publisher, with Creative Computing’s former editor, Betsy Staples, as editor. In his first editorial he hesitated to call the magazine “new and improved”, because the words were so overused: “Would refreshed and enhanced sound better?” In 1989 he was also publisher and editor of Atarian, the magazine of Atari’s video game club.

Then he left computing. From 1996 to 2001 he was publisher and editor of Military Vehicles magazine, and he later wrote for Classic Military Vehicle. He still believed in the type-in: “It’s still possible to learn a lot from a type-in program and coding in general,” he told Wireframe in 2021. In June 2022 he placed everything he had written or edited in the public domain, including Creative Computing and the BASIC Computer Games books.

Sources

John J. Anderson, “Dave Tells Ahl: The History of Creative Computing”, Creative Computing, November 1984, pp. 66–74: Ahl’s life to 1984 (Malverne and Radio Row; Cornell; Carnegie-Mellon; the Army; Management Science Associates; DEC, the EduSystem and EDU; 101 Basic Computer Games and the million-copy claim; the plan of 17 May 1974 and Ken Olsen’s reply; AT&T; the first print run; circulation; leaving AT&T in July 1978; ROM, Microsystems and SYNC; Ziff-Davis). Public scan: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1984-11
David Crookes, “Type-in of the Dead”, Wireframe issue 52, June 2021, pp. 70–75: Ahl on DEC, EDU and the games readers sent; “a pretty crude book”; Super Star Trek; his age; type-ins as a way to learn.
David H. Ahl (ed.), BASIC Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (Creative Computing / Workman Publishing, 1978): introduction and “About this Book” (the 1973 DEC edition; six dialects of BASIC), and back cover (“founder and publisher of Creative Computing”). See the BASIC Computer Games entry.
Creative Computing, January 1981: Ahl’s advertisement giving combined sales of “over one half million copies” (see the BASIC Computer Games entry).
Creative Computing vol. 6 no. 9, September 1980, and vol. 7 no. 12, December 1981: advertisements for Computers in Mathematics: A Sourcebook of Ideas. Its date and publisher (Creative Computing Press, Morristown, 1979) are as cited in Tim Hartnell, Creating Simulation Games on Your Computer (Ballantine Books, 1986).
Computer Language issue 5, January 1985, p. 25: Bob Libes on Ahl’s “publishing empire” and the sale to Ziff-Davis.
Atari Explorer, September/October 1986, p. 6: David H. Ahl, editorial (“new and improved”; Betsy Staples as editor). December 1986 and later issues: masthead, “Publisher David H. Ahl”.
Atarian vol. 1 no. 1, May 1989: masthead, “Publisher/Editor David H. Ahl”; the magazine of the Atarian Video Game Club, sponsored by Atari.
David H. Ahl, biography on his website, SwapMeetDave (web, secondary): degrees (Cornell, 1961; Carnegie-Mellon MBA, 1963); Army service, 1963–1965; DEC, AT&T and Creative Computing; Military Vehicles magazine, 1996–2001; Classic Military Vehicle. https://www.swapmeetdave.com/Ahl/DHAbio.htm
Jerry Stratton, “Creative Computing and BASIC Computer Games in public domain”, 24 August 2022 (web, secondary). https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/22852042-creative-computing-and-basic-computer-games-in-public-domain
Wikipedia, “David H. Ahl” (web, secondary): date of birth; the public-domain notice of June 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Ahl