[Images warning] My weird hobby: scrolling old computer magazines

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As a full-time web developer, I find how little effort gets put into building the web nowadays, so disappointing and demotivating sometimes...

(Don't get me started on how modern web feels like endless stream of just the same... I suppose, it is a pet peeve of many of the visitors of this forum, so I'm in a good company...)

So, my hobby is browsing archive.org/retromags.com searching for old computer/internet magazines and, well, staring at them. Magazines from the dawn of the internet, from .COM bubble era, when "Multimedia" was a hype word.

It inspires me. Forgive me this cliche, but it comes from the times when these things mattered. Some were stuffed with ads, but even these ads were high effort and are sort of time capsule. Some things are very funny. Some are absurdly well/expensive made. Some aged like fine wine. I save ads, arts, pieces of ads, pieces of articles etc...

ZD Internet Magazine Volume 1 Issue 1 (December 1996)

"Down here we do HTML the old fashioned way"

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"Maybe they should call themselves parasites instead."

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"Certain moments in life are slow and painful. Surfing the web shouldn't be one of them."

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"If you can click a mouse, you can create a Web Page"

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"Twenty inside tips for IE 3.0 Administrators"

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"Every hit counts" (don't forget, it is a 1996 magazine, so it is almost certainly not an Elon Musk caricature)

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Pentium pro ad

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"Error 404? Is this any way to greet your customers?"

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Internet Underground Vol.1 No.09 (Aug 1996) Alternative Scan
The design of this magazine. It has cultural value on itself. The magazine cover is itself a masterpiece...

"The internet is being disinfected for your protection"

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We do know the answer to this one in 2026

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As a chronically online I find this ad... ominous.

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Just couple cool arts from this issue

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Internet Underground Vol.01 No.01 (Dec 1995)

"This page is not enhanced for Netscape 1.2"

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"Internet users are notoriously picky about email"

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"The front lines of the electronic entertainment revolution can be a dangerous place"

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One of my favorite games ever. Strange to see ad for a game from my childhood.

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Couple artworks

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[wp0]

This weird hobby of mine started with me reading Japanese Oh! PC magazine (well, looking through, not reading, I don't speak Japanese sadly). It had glorious photos of Japanese tec I never seen in my life, and of things common to me, but marketed very differently. Foreign to me, different scale, different effort.

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[TheFrugalGamer]

Oh man, this is some good stuff. I adore that "HTML Hell" image at the top, and the mixed media art is great too. I don't see many design magazines anymore doing that sort of thing. Not sure if it's because I'm not running into them, or they've just all gotten too bland. Do you have a place where you archive these?

[wp0]

Do you have a place where you archive these?

Well, I collect them on my hard drive mainly :D They are quite big to host them.
Good news is hunting for those is a very interesting process on itself - if you have a goal of finding inspiring thing each magazine becomes a very cozy rabbit hole:
https://archive.org/details/oh-pc-issue-136-dec-01-1990
couple clicks and...

look what I found!

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I don't see many design magazines anymore doing that sort of thing

Well, I am pretty sure there are some that try still, maybe some truly underground stuff. Most are are printed press though (a kind of glossy magazine you see in your local music shop, just casually laying there), and probably are niche enough so no one bothers digitizing them. There are indie digital mags like lainzine, but they lack in quality.

I mainly dumpster dive in old scans :D In modern day it would be too expensive to produce stuff like those old mags, and probably they won't get ad contracts too, because... noone reads magazines, apparently, anymore. At least you don't see glossy computer literature on local news stand kiosks in my part of the world.

So, there's no incentive to publish them, at least in paper: it's all now on the internet, since posts are cheap to produce and they have bigger audience, and everybody has got a smartphone in their pocket. Or maybe not even posts but some tiktok shorts or something like that.

A lot of things are sorta commodified nowadays to a point that everything is standard, easily digestible, made to be quickly consumed (because if something can't be understood or at least felt in 5 seconds - it is boring), rated (because how can one know something is good without a little counter below) and automated... (sorry for yelling at cloud, it is my pet peeve :D)

The above is purely speculative, of course (: