Thoughts on early CU...
Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2005 3:57 am
So I just got my CU DVD compilation yesterday and had a quick browse.
Remember that from an American perspective, this is all very new to me. I hadn't seen CU until CU Amiga in 92/93, and magazine importing was pretty rare in the 80s.
I was struck at how much CU looked and to a certain degree read like US mag Compute at its inception (even down to some of the fonts, not to mention the inclusion of Jim Butterfield)... was surprised to see that the type-in programs didn't appear to have any sort of checksumming to them (a trick all the US mags picked up on very early and DID, in fact, make entering those damn programs sometimes sort of vaguely bearable)... and I also was a little taken aback by how poor the reporting tended to be despite the more serious bent of the magazine.
In ZZap, I guess it would be one thing to report a piece of news about a new machine launch or other significant development with no analysis more serious than "Lloyd Mangram, the fish, and Paul Sumner say it'll be ace", because you pretty much could tell how seriously it should be taken (I hope, anyway), but given that CU seemed to be aiming for more adult respectability, some of the reporting was pretty slipshod. Events as serious as machines launching, plants being shut down, and so on and so forth were given rather fannish and amateur analysis.
(and, oh yeah, the Infiltrator review really was a travesty. Excellent game.)
Not related to the quality of the magazine itself, it was also especially painful to relive through the primary sources of the day the truly terrible and aimless decisions Commodore made at its very peak, ranging from the +4/16 wastes of time to the whole sad Amiga story.
Remember that from an American perspective, this is all very new to me. I hadn't seen CU until CU Amiga in 92/93, and magazine importing was pretty rare in the 80s.
I was struck at how much CU looked and to a certain degree read like US mag Compute at its inception (even down to some of the fonts, not to mention the inclusion of Jim Butterfield)... was surprised to see that the type-in programs didn't appear to have any sort of checksumming to them (a trick all the US mags picked up on very early and DID, in fact, make entering those damn programs sometimes sort of vaguely bearable)... and I also was a little taken aback by how poor the reporting tended to be despite the more serious bent of the magazine.
In ZZap, I guess it would be one thing to report a piece of news about a new machine launch or other significant development with no analysis more serious than "Lloyd Mangram, the fish, and Paul Sumner say it'll be ace", because you pretty much could tell how seriously it should be taken (I hope, anyway), but given that CU seemed to be aiming for more adult respectability, some of the reporting was pretty slipshod. Events as serious as machines launching, plants being shut down, and so on and so forth were given rather fannish and amateur analysis.
(and, oh yeah, the Infiltrator review really was a travesty. Excellent game.)
Not related to the quality of the magazine itself, it was also especially painful to relive through the primary sources of the day the truly terrible and aimless decisions Commodore made at its very peak, ranging from the +4/16 wastes of time to the whole sad Amiga story.
)