A Computer History Time Capsule

Once upon a time, before the Internet, computer hobbyists went to great lengths to learn about their new technology. Many of these learning opportunities were inherently social: computer classes, software store hangouts, electronic bulletin board systems, and user groups.

A user group or computer club was a wonderful way to get to know people in your region who were also learning about computers. They’d meet once a week or once a month at a computer store or pizza parlor or someone’s basement. Some groups met to play and trade games, some to write software, some to explore what the world of personal computing meant for their businesses.

One of the earliest groups was the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, California, which had its first meeting in 1975. That was just a seed: thousands of regional computer groups quickly sprouted up around the world. Many of these groups were dedicated to one particular brand of computer, back in the day when there were countless incompatible flavors of computing machinery. Computer clubs offered various benefits to their members, such as public-domain software to trade, expert speakers at meetings, and printed newsletters.

Ultimately, easy access to information and communities on the Internet led to the demise of most regional computer clubs, and with them, the computer club newsletter. Although they’re not published anymore, these newsletters are neither gone nor forgotten: thousands of computer newsletters are still available at Internet Archive, covering every conceivable platform, programming language, and interest group.

I’m not here to share the story of newsletters in general, and not just here to talk about newsletters for my favorite old computing platform, Atari computers. I’m here to share the story of newsletters about Atari computers for one particular month, August 1987.

The Jersey Atari Computer Group was a group based in New Jersey, USA. As was pretty common, the group published a monthly newsletter for its members, and it coordinated a newsletter exchange with other Atari clubs. The secretary would mail the JACG newsletter to other groups, and in return those clubs sent their newsletters to JACG. The club secretary collected those faraway clubs’ newsletters into binders and organized them by publication date. One of those binders managed to survive the decades, and last year I was given the binder with a collection of newsletters all with a cover date of August 1987. That collection contains 50 newsletters from Atari user groups in United States, Canada, and Australia.

Presumably the club collected newsletters in that way every month, but I don’t know if any other monthly collections survived; this is the only one that I’ve found.

The club secretary’s careful collection of newsletters plus the accidental survival of the binder has created a perfect time capsule of the Atari computer scene that summer 39 years ago. In those 50 newsletters, hundreds of little dramas play out. Among them:

“Rumors abound on reasons why Epyx has practically refused to support the 8-bit line of Ataris.”

“The ST has yet another new wave of remarkable and mind-boggling products on the way. Within our first hour at CES we saw a 4-megabyte memory board that goes into any ST without soldering.”

“I’m getting sick of everybody complaining that there is no new software for the eight-Bit computers, Ever since I have joined the HNYAUG I have seen everybody complain about no new software, but nobody doing anything about it.”

“This is a notice that the AtariFest, originally scheduled for Chicago on the 25th and 26th of July, 1987, has been officially cancelled. There were several reasons for doing this, but FIRST and FOREMOST, let me dispel three major rumors that have been spread about the ‘Fest in Chicago…”

“The FCC is contemplating a move that some say will raise the cost of on-line conference and database services by a factor of between five and 15…”

It was a time of intense change for computer users: the inexpensive and beloved Atari 8-bit line was quickly becoming obsolete, being replaced by speedy and graphically powerful 16-bit computers. The Summer 1987 Consumer Electronics Show had just taken place, with enticing announcements of new hardware. The changes are evident in the content and production of those newsletters: some printed with clattery dot-matrix printers, some sleek with newfangled desktop publishing software. Some pages feature BASIC and machine language program code that users could type in; others encouraged users to get online to download programs instead.

Some common themes emerge across the newsletters: interest in going online for the first time, an uneasy relationship between computer companies and their users, worries about software piracy, and stereotypes about women in the computer world.

The collection is 50 snapshots of computing communities in tiny regions of the world that combine into a remarkably detailed portrait of the Atari world, 39 summers ago.

You can explore all 700 pages of newsletters here, or peruse them as 50 individual newsletters.

Internet Archive also offers . Or focus on your choice of writings about the or the Pick operating system or or the Apple Lisa or the Dvorak keyboard … and so many more.