It makes me sad, although not surprised, to see that Ziff Media will stop printing the paper edition of PC Magazine soon. For sentimental reasons, here is a copy of the cover from their very first issue, back in 1982, that features an interview with a very young Bill Gates talking about how his mother would have trouble using the early PCs, a report on the first Comdex, and ads for VisiCalc, AST memory boards and Amdek monitors (that displayed text in green characters only), and a review of Easywriter word processing software.

Here is the announcement over on Paid Content,  including an interview with Jason Young, current CEO.

I didn’t do much work for Mag, as we in the biz called it, but that was more a matter of circumstance and timing than anything else. When I started at PC Week, Mag set the standard for lab tests and comparative reviews. Here are some commentary from people that worked there during the go-go years, when issues would stretch to 400+ pages and hundreds of products:

• Bill Machrone, the second EIC after David Bunnell left to start PC World 
• Michael Miller, former EIC during the 1990s
• Larry Seltzer, lab director during the same time
• Barbara Krasnoff, who worked there briefly
• Steven Vaughan-Nichols, long time freelancer

Feel free to post your own memories here in the comments section.

If you want to see other computer magazine covers from the early days, check out the ones that I have scanned here.