Popular Electronics Magazine
Overview
Popular Electronics Magazine profiles Popular Electronics, an American monthly magazine for electronics hobbyists and experimenters founded by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in October 1954 in New York. It soon became, by its publisher's description, the world's largest-selling electronics magazine. In April 1957 Ziff-Davis reported an average net paid circulation of 240,151 copies, and during its last year under Ziff-Davis the magazine reported an average monthly circulation of 409,344 copies. Ziff-Davis published it until October 1982, launching a successor, Computers and Electronics, the following month. The title was later sold to Gernsback Publications, whose Hands-On Electronics was renamed Popular Electronics in February 1989 and published until December 1999. The trademark was then acquired by John August Media, which revived the title as a digital edition. Its most famous issue, January 1975, put the Altair 8800 computer on the cover and ignited the home computer revolution.
History
Popular Electronics began in 1954 serving the post-war boom in electronics as a hobby: radio, hi-fi, kits, and home experimentation. A major change came in 1971-72, when Radio and Television News, which had become Electronics World in 1959, was merged into Popular Electronics, with the process starting in summer 1971 under a new editor, Milton S. Snitzer, replacing longtime editor Oliver P. Ferrell. The publishers refocused the combined magazine on topics with prosperous advertisers such as citizens band radio and audio equipment, and construction projects ceased to be the feature articles, replaced by new product reviews. The change upset many authors; Dan Meyer referred to the merged magazine in his SWTPC catalog as PEEW and urged customers toward Radio-Electronics, and writers including Don Lancaster, Daniel Meyer, Forrest Mims, Ed Roberts, and John Simonton switched to the rival for a time. That very rivalry sharpened the competition that produced the personal computer cover stories of 1974-75.
The January 1975 Altair Issue
The January 1975 issue is the most consequential single issue of any electronics magazine. Its cover story presented the Altair 8800, a buildable computer based on the Intel 8080 processor, offered by MITS of Albuquerque, New Mexico as a kit for 397 dollars in most accounts of the article, with related reports giving kit and assembled prices of 395 and 495 dollars. The article, by MITS president Ed Roberts and William Yates, ran in the January and February 1975 issues and explained to readers who might never have seen a computer what software and programming meant. Technical editor Les Solomon had been seeking a computer project to match the Mark-8 published by rival Radio-Electronics in 1974, flew to Albuquerque to arrange the feature, and, by the well-attested account, the prototype shipped to New York was lost in transit, so the cover photograph showed an empty case. Solomon's daughter, watching Star Trek, suggested the name Altair, which Roberts accepted.
How the Altair Story Started Microsoft
Paul Allen saw the January 1975 issue at Harvard Square and showed it to Bill Gates. The two contacted Roberts, wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and founded Microsoft, formally dated to 4 April 1975. Forrest Mims, a MITS co-founder who had written for Popular Electronics since an Opticom LED communicator cover article in November 1970, written with Henry E. Roberts, recalled that the magazine desperately wanted an 8-bit computer project and that his introduction of Solomon to Roberts in New Mexico made the connection that produced the Altair feature. Roberts asked Mims to write the Altair 8800 user's manual in exchange for an assembled Altair, which Mims later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 1987 with MITS documents. Few magazine articles have a comparable documented consequence: a cover story that launched a computer, an industry, and the world's largest software company.
Content and Editorial Focus
Through its classic period Popular Electronics mixed construction projects readers could build, tutorials explaining new components such as light-emitting diodes and integrated circuits, product news, and columns. Forrest Mims persuaded editor Art Salsberg in October 1975 to give him a monthly column, Experimenter's Corner, and later added Project of the Month and Solid-State Developments, at one point writing three columns in the magazine simultaneously; he wrote for it until 1985 in the successor era. Solid State columnist Lou Garner was another long-running presence, moving to Radio-Electronics for a year during the merger turmoil. After the 1971 merger the emphasis shifted toward reviews and advertiser-friendly subjects including CB radio and audio, but the project tradition survived strongly enough that the Altair, a project in form even if most readers bought the kit, could appear as the magazine's defining cover five years into the new direction.
Editors and Contributors
Oliver P. Ferrell was the longtime editor before the 1971 transition to Milton S. Snitzer. Les Solomon, the technical editor, was the magazine's most historically important staff member: he cultivated authors personally, visiting Mims and Roberts in New Mexico in 1970, advised them on selling project kits, helped place their articles, and brokered the Altair cover. He even wrote six articles for rival Radio-Electronics under the pseudonym B. R. Rogen during the merger period. Art Salsberg edited the magazine in the mid-1970s and later founded Modern Electronics. Contributors included Forrest M. Mims III, whose hand-drawn, hand-lettered style later defined his Radio Shack books, Ed Roberts, Don Lancaster, Dan Meyer, and John Simonton, a circle whose members founded companies including MITS and SWTPC that created the early personal computer industry.
Circulation and Audience
Circulation figures trace the growth of electronics as a mass hobby. The 240,151 average net paid circulation reported in April 1957 made Popular Electronics the largest title of its kind within three years of launch. By its final Ziff-Davis year the reported average monthly circulation was 409,344. The audience was hobbyists and experimenters: radio amateurs, kit builders, technicians, students, and the engineers-by-night who read project articles with a soldering iron nearby. That audience explains the Altair's impact. Popular Electronics readers were precisely the people prepared to order a 397 dollar computer kit from an Albuquerque model-rocket company on the strength of a magazine article, and thousands did, overwhelming MITS and creating the first personal computer market.
Ownership, Successors, and Revival
Ziff-Davis published Popular Electronics from 1954 until October 1982. In November 1982 Ziff-Davis launched Computers and Electronics as the successor, reflecting the audience's centre of gravity moving from circuits to computing. The Popular Electronics title itself was sold to Gernsback Publications, a name with deep roots in hobbyist publishing, and in February 1989 Gernsback renamed its Hands-On Electronics magazine to Popular Electronics; that incarnation ran until December 1999. The trademark then passed to John August Media, LLC, which revived Popular Electronics as a digital edition hosted at TechnicaCuriosa.com alongside sister heritage titles Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Astronomy. The magazine's format in its classic Ziff-Davis form was 8.5 by 11 inches with colour covers, monthly throughout.
Digital Presence and Preservation
The complete classic run is unusually accessible. Archives of Popular Electronics issues from 1954 to 1982 have been made available for free download in PDF form through radio and electronics history archives, an availability that drew wide attention when the archive was publicized in 2015. The January 1975 issue is the most sought-after, but researchers use the full run to trace the hobbyist adoption of transistors, integrated circuits, LEDs, CB radio, home computing, and video games at the level of what an ordinary experimenter could buy and build. The digital revival under John August Media keeps the title itself alive as a heritage brand even though the original magazine's era ended in 1982 and its Gernsback continuation in 1999.
Legacy and Current Status
The original Popular Electronics is defunct as a Ziff-Davis print magazine, ending in 1982, with later continuations ending in 1999 and a digital revival thereafter. Its legacy is outsized. For three decades it was the common reading of the American electronics hobby, training the audience that built the personal computer industry and giving that industry its founding moment in January 1975. Editorial director Arthur Salsberg's successor-era judgement, echoed by later historians, that the Altair issue ushered in the home computer age has been borne out: Paul Allen and Bill Gates themselves credited the cover story as Microsoft's starting point. No other hobbyist magazine can claim to have launched both a bestselling computer and the software era in a single issue.
