About Creative Computing

Creative Computing

Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines of the microcomputer revolution, published from October 1974 to December 1985. Founded by David H. Ahl in Morristown, New Jersey, it began as a magazine about computers in education and grew into a general magazine for hobbyist, home, and personal computing, written in a more accessible style than its technically oriented contemporary Byte. It printed BASIC program listings that readers typed into their machines, published the first million-selling computer book, BASIC Computer Games, through its associated press, and sold software on cassette and disk under its own label. Ahl sold the magazine to Ziff-Davis in the early 1980s and remained as editor-in-chief; an attempted turn toward business computing at the end of its run failed, and publication ceased with the December 1985 issue.

David Ahl and the DEC Years

The founder, David H. Ahl, came to publishing from the educational marketing operation of Digital Equipment Corporation, the minicomputer maker known as DEC. In the early 1970s, working in DEC's educational department, he started a newsletter called EDU for educational users of DEC machines, beginning in the spring of 1971. DEC then had only a few thousand machines in educational settings, yet EDU's circulation reached about 20,000 within eighteen months, because many subscribers used it as a general source on computers in education whether or not they owned DEC equipment. That response planted Ahl's idea of an independent magazine for the whole educational computing audience. In the same period he persuaded DEC to publish his collection 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973; it sold over 10,000 copies in its early printings. Ahl was let go in a DEC downsizing in February 1973 and rehired by another department to work on low-end minicomputers, but the magazine idea went with him when he finally left DEC in July 1974.

Founding on His Own Money

Ahl first tried to fund the new magazine through educational foundations and failed. He decided to publish with his own money. He mailed about 11,000 promotional flyers and received roughly 850 subscriptions in reply, enough to begin. The first issue, dated November/December 1974, was published in October 1974. An early subscription appeal described the magazine as a lively publication for students and teachers using computers in colleges, secondary schools, and even the lower grades, offering games, simulations, problems, exercises, and curriculum materials directly usable in the classroom, across mathematics, science, social science, ecology, and career education, under the conviction that computers could make learning fun. Instead of printing only enough copies for his subscribers, Ahl printed about 8,000 copies of each of the first issues and mailed the surplus free to schools and libraries around the country, a gamble that built the audience and the advertising base together.

From Classroom to Living Room

The magazine was created to cover educational computing, and its early issues carried classroom articles, simple programs such as madlibs, and programming challenges, mostly in BASIC. As the microcomputer market emerged in the late 1970s, Creative Computing moved with it toward general coverage of hobbyist and home computing. Hardware reviews and news became more common, while type-in programs remained a staple into the early 1980s. The magazine's tone set it apart from Byte, its great rival: where Byte addressed engineers, Creative Computing addressed teachers, families, and beginners, and it has often been described, in Ahl's own phrase, as the first personal computing magazine. Its Morristown, New Jersey operation made it one of the notable East Coast centers of the early personal computer press.

Editors and Writers

Four editors served in the magazine's first six years: Ahl himself, Steve Gray, John Craig, and, briefly, Ted Nelson, the philosopher of computing known for inventing the concept of hypertext. Betsy Staples, later Betsy Ahl, then took over as editor and ran the magazine for the rest of its existence, while David Ahl remained editor-in-chief after the sale to Ziff-Davis. Featured writers included Robert Swirsky, David Lubar, who went on to a career in young-adult fiction, and John J. Anderson. The staff's dual identity, educators who were also hobbyists, shaped a magazine that could explain a sorting algorithm and review a game in adjacent columns without condescension to either audience.

Programs, Star Trek, and the Type-In Culture

Like its competitors, Creative Computing regularly printed BASIC source code for games and utilities that readers entered by hand, and those listings were a primary channel through which hobbyist games spread in the 1970s. A signal example came in the May/June 1975 issue, which published Super Star Trek, Bob Leedom's greatly expanded version of the mainframe game Star Trek, adapted for microcomputer BASIC from Ahl's earlier book version. Through the magazine and the later anthologies, Super Star Trek became the most widely played computer game of its decade. The magazine also published software separately on cassette tape and floppy disk for the popular systems of the time, and maintained a small hardware business, so that readers could buy on media what others typed from the page.

Books: BASIC Computer Games and the Best Of Volumes

The magazine's book arm, Creative Computing Press, produced the era's landmark title. Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, the microcomputer edition of his DEC collection, published in 1978 as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET reached the market, became the first computer book to sell a million copies, with its sequel More BASIC Computer Games following. The press also issued three anthology volumes, The Best of Creative Computing Magazine, in 1976, 1977, and 1980; the cover of the second volume was illustrated by the underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton. The books gave the magazine's best programs and articles a permanent form and spread its influence into school and public libraries that never subscribed to the magazine itself.

A Family of Magazines and Ventures

David and Betsy Ahl extended the Creative Computing operation into a small publishing group. Sister magazines included Sync, devoted to the Timex Sinclair computers; Microsystems; Small Business Computers; and Creative Computing Video and Arcade Games Magazine, which followed the arcade and home video game boom. The company issued a record album of the First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival in 1979, a board game called Computer Rage, and software for a variety of platforms under the Creative Computing Software label. The range of ventures, festival records, games, software, and specialist magazines from one Morristown company, captured the improvisational energy of the personal computer industry's first decade, when the boundaries between publishing, software, and hobbyist culture were still being drawn.

The April 1980 Parodies

The magazine had a sense of humor about its own industry. The April 1980 issue contained affectionate parodies of all the major computer magazines of the time, the sort of in-joke that assumed a readership fluent in the personalities and styles of a still-small publishing world. That issue is regularly singled out in retrospectives as evidence of the magazine's character: technically serious, educationally earnest, and yet willing to treat the microcomputer scene, including itself, as material for comedy. The parody issue also marked the end of the industry's innocence; within a few years the personal computer business would be too large, and too corporate, for one magazine to parody all the others from personal knowledge.

The Ziff-Davis Sale

Ahl sold Creative Computing to Ziff-Davis in the early 1980s, the acquisition being completed in 1982 by some accounts and 1983 in others, and he remained as editor-in-chief while Betsy Ahl continued as editor. Ziff-Davis, a major magazine publisher building a computer list that would come to dominate the industry, closed the company's non-magazine ventures, ending the software, record, and game sidelines, and folded Creative Computing into a professional magazine operation. Under corporate ownership the magazine continued through the home computer boom of the early 1980s, but the market it had been created for, enthusiastic amateurs typing BASIC, was being displaced by packaged software, dedicated game machines, and the standardized IBM PC world.

Final Turn and Closure

At the end of its run Creative Computing attempted the same pivot most general computer magazines attempted in 1985, refocusing on business computing. The new audience of corporate PC buyers was already served by larger business titles, and the magazine was not successful in the turn. Publication ceased at the end of 1985, the final issue being dated December 1985, closing an eleven-year run that had begun before the first personal computers were sold in stores. David and Betsy Ahl went on to publish Atari Explorer magazine for five years; Ahl later started the short-lived Atarian in 1989 and later still published Military Vehicles magazine, while his BASIC Computer Games remained in print in the memory of the industry as its first million-selling book.

Legacy and Archives

Creative Computing is preserved nearly complete in digital archives: the Internet Archive holds a full scanned collection of the magazine, organized from the scans assembled by archivist Kevin Savetz, and its issues are standard sources for historians of educational technology, hobbyist computing, and early game culture. Its historical claim is substantial. It was among the very first magazines to treat the computer as a personal and educational medium rather than an industrial one; it distributed software in print to a generation of students; and its founder's books carried BASIC programming into a million homes and classrooms. In this directory it is recorded as a Morristown, New Jersey publication, monthly in its mature years, issued from October 1974 to December 1985 under ISSN 0097-8140, first independently by David H. Ahl and finally by Ziff-Davis.