For those of you who don’t know what en e-zine is, it’s an electronic magazine. My first experience of an E-zine was in the 80’s on my C64 and it came on a 5 and a quater inch floppy disk. The electronic magazine, contained much the same articles and information as a printed computer magazine, but with the added bonus of music, and interactivity.
E-zine’s did quite well in the 80’s and early 90’s on the 8 and 16bit systems, until the Internet became established. They were made available by demo groups everywhere via BBS systems and post outs, usually costing you nothing more than the cost of duplicating the floppy and postage, or the time and expense required to download it over you 1200 baud modem.
Infact, so popular were e-zines on the PD (public domain – much like an early version of gpl) scene that Brian and myself even produced a tape based ezine, for c64 owners living in our own loacality. It had to be tape based because even though we had disk drives, we were in the minority, early adopters so to speak. It contained all the game reviews that two kids could come up with, a flashy inteface with parallax scrolling, done in assembly, some cool tunes ripped from demos and also show cased some of our own upcomming c64 demos and games. All in all it went and sold quite well. Although the money we made from it probably never paid for the countless hours of work that went into proudcing them. Still, it was fun, a learning experience and we could buy a couple of ice-creams and enough chocolate and cola to fuel us through the production of the next issue.
Now, after all these years it looks as if the e-zine is back, although without the music and parallax scrolling! Home Computer Magazine is a free downloadable pdf magazine, which is written by veteran “glossy computer magazine” writers. It’s about 40 pages long, and features some neat interactive features where you can click on references and links in the magazine and be whipped off to the relevant site straight away. Being an e-zine it also has the benefits of animation and higher quality screenshots in game reviews than those available in the printed counterparts.
Home Computer magazine is 100% free to download and makes it’s cash from advertising space sold in the side columns of the pages. Cynics of advertisment driven magazines, who feel it may “taint” the content can read this. The magazine is available in two versions, one for broadband users and one for people on slower connections, although the only real differnce is the quality of the graphics. You can download via bittoerrent or regualr http, and the full size version clocks in at around 10mb.
The magazine is well put together, and is suffering a little from the initial stages of it’s infancy, ie, user letters page is a little sparce, but these things occur with printed publications as well. All in all, it’s a well rounded little publication, that I expect will really take off once it gets out of it’s intitial teething stages.
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