Everything about Popular Electronics totally explained
Popular Electronics was a magazine started by
Ziff-Davis Publishing in October 1954 for hobbyist and experimenters in electronics. It soon became the "World's Largest-Selling Electronics Magazine". The circulation was 240,151 in April 1957 and 400,000 by 1963. Ziff-Davis published
Popular Electronics until April 1985. Gernsback Publications acquired the title in 1988 and renamed their
Hands-On Electronics. That version of
Popular Electronics was published until December 1999.
A cover story on
Popular Electronics could launch a new product or company. The most famous issue, January 1975, had the
Altair 8800 computer on the cover and this ignited the home computer revolution.
Paul Allen showed that issue to
Bill Gates. They wrote a
BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer and started
Microsoft.
How it started
Radio & Television News was a magazine for professionals and the editors wanted to create a magazine just for hobbyist. Ziff-Davis had started
Popular Aviation in 1927 and
Popular Photography in 1934 but found that Gernsback Publications had the trademark on Popular Electronics. It was a used in
Radio-Craft from 1943 until 1948. Ziff-Davis bought the trademark and started
Popular Electronics with the October 1954 issue.
Many of the editors and authors worked for both Ziff-Davis magazines. Initially Oliver Read was the editor of both
Radio & Television News and
Popular Electronics. Read was promoted to Publisher in June 1956. Oliver Perry Ferrell took over as editor of
Popular Electronics and William A. Stocklin became editor of
Radio & Television News. In
Radio & TV News John T. Frye wrote a column on a fictional repair shop where the proprietor, Mac, would interact with other technicians and customers. The reader would learn repair techniques for servicing radios and TVs. In
Popular Electronics his column was about two high school boys, Carl and Jerry. Each month the boys would have an adventure that would teach the reader about electronics.
By 1954 building audio and radio kits was a growing pastime.
Heathkit and many others offered kits that included all of the parts with detailed instructions. The premier cover shows the assembly of a Heathkit A-7B audio amplifier.
Popular Electronics would offer projects that were built from scratch, that's the individual parts were purchased a local electronics store or by mail order. The early issues often showed these as father and son projects.
Most of the early project used
vacuum tubes;
transistors had just become available to hobbyist. The Raytheon
CK722 was $3.50 in the December 1954 issue; a
12AX7 dual triode tube was only $0.61. Lou Garner wrote the feature story for the first issue, a battery powered tube radio that could be used on a bicycle. Later he was given a column called Transistor Topics (June 1956). Transistors soon cost less than a dollar and transistor project became common in every issue of
Popular Electronics. The column was renamed to Solid State in 1965 and ran under his byline until December 1978.
Typical 1962 issue
The July 1962 issue had 112 pages, the editor was Olivier P. Ferrell and the monthly circulation was 400,000. The magazine had a full page of electronics news that was called "POP'tronics News Scope." In January 2000 a successor magazine was renamed
Poptronics. In the 1960s
Fawcett Publications had a competing magazine,
Electronics Illustrated.
The cover showed a 15 inch black and white TV kit by Conar that cost $135. The feature construction story was a "Radiation Fallout Monitor" for "keeping track of the radiation level in your neighborhood." (The
Cuban Missile Crisis was that October.) Other construction projects included "The Fish Finder", an underwater temperature probe; the "Transistorized Tremolo" for an electric guitar; and a one tube
VHF receiver to listen to aircraft.
There were regular columns for
Citizens Band (CB),
amateur radio and
shortwave listening (SWL). These would show a reader with his radio equipment each month. (Almost all of the readers were male.) Lou Garner's Transistor Topics covers the new transistorized FM stereo receivers and several readers' circuits. John T. Frye's fictional characters, Carl and Jerry, use a PH meter to locate the source of pollution in a river.
Authors and Kits
As Editor, Olivier Ferrell built a stable of authors who contributed interesting construction projects. These projects established the style of Popular Electronics for years to come. Two of the most prolific authors were Daniel Meyer and Don Lancaster.
Daniel Meyer graduated from
Southwest Texas State (1957) and became an engineer at
Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. He soon started writing hobbyist articles. The first was in
Electronics World (May 1960) and latter he'd a 2 part cover feature for
Radio Electronics (October, November 1962). The March 1963 issue of
Popular Electronics featured his ultrasonic listening device on the cover.
Don Lancaster graduated from
Lafayette College (1961) and
Arizona State University (1966). A 1960s fad was to have colored lights synchronized with music. This
psychedelic lighting was made economical by the development of the
silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR). Don's first published article was "Solid-State 3-Channel Color Organ" in the April 1963 issue of
Electronics World. He was paid $150 for the story.
The projects in
Popular Electronics changed from vacuum tube to solid state in the early 1960s. Tube circuits used a metal chassis with sockets, transistor circuits worked best on a
printed circuit board. They would often contain components that were not available at the local electronics parts store.
Dan Meyer saw the business opportunity in providing circuit boards and parts for the
Popular Electronics projects. In January 1964 he left Southwest Research Institute to start an electronics kit company. He continued to write articles and ran the mail order kit business from his home in San Antonio, Texas. By 1965 he was providing the kits for other authors such as Lou Garner. In 1967 he sold a kit for Don Lancaster's "IC-67 Metal Locator". In early 1967 Meyer moved his growing business from his home to a new building on a 3 acre site in San Antonio. The Daniel E. Meyer Company (DEMCO) became Southwest Technical Products Corporation (
SWTPC) that fall.
In 1967,
Popular Electronics had 6 articles by Dan Meyer and 4 by Don Lancaster. Seven of that year's cover stories featured kits sold by SWTPC. In the years 1966 to 1971 SWTPC's authors wrote 64 articles and had 25 cover stories in
Popular Electronics. (Don Lancaster alone had 23 articles and 10 were cover stories.) The
San Antonio Express-News did a feature story on Southwest Technical Products in November 1972. "Meyer built his mail-order business from scratch to more than $1 million in sales in six years." The company was shipping 100 kits a day from 18,000 square feet of buildings.
Others noticed SWTPC success.
Forrest Mims, a founder of
MITS (Altair 8800), tells about his "
Light-Emitting Diodes" cover story (
Popular Electronics, November 1970) in an interview with
Creative Computing.
In March, I sold my first article to Popular Electronics magazine, a feature about light-emitting diodes. At one of our midnight meetings I suggested that we emulate Southwest Technical Products and develop a project article for Popular Electronics. The article would give us free advertising for the kit version of the project, and the magazine would even pay us for the privilege of printing it!
The November 1970 issue also has an article by Forrest M. Mims and
Henry E. Roberts titled "Assemble an LED Communicator - The Opticon." A kit of parts could be ordered from MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Popular Electronics paid $400 for the article.
Merger with Electronics World
Radio & Television News became
Electronics World in 1959 and in January 1972 was merged into
Popular Electronics. The process started in the summer of 1971 with a new editor, Milton S. Snitzer, replacing the long time editor, Oliver P. Ferrell. The publishers decided to focus on topics with prosperous advertisers, such as CB Radio and audio equipment. Construction projects were no longer the feature articles. They were replaced by new product reviews. The change in editorial direction upset many authors. Dan Meyer wrote a letter in his SWTPC catalog referring to the magazine,
Popular Electronics with
Electronics World, as "PEEW". He urged his customers to switch to
Radio Electronics.
Don Lancaster,
Daniel Meyer,
Forrest Mims,
Ed Roberts,
John Simonton and other authors switched to Radio Electronics. Even Solid State columnist Lou Garner moved to
Radio Electronics for a year. In 1972 and 1973 some of the best projects appeared in
Radio Electronics as the new
Popular Electronics digested the merger. The upcoming personal computer benefited from this competition between
Radio Electronics and
Popular Electronics.
In September 1973
Radio Electronics published Don Lancaster's
TV Typewriter, a low cost video display. In July 1974
Radio Electronics published the
Mark-8 Personal Minicomputer based on the
Intel 8008 processor. The publishers noted the success of
Radio Electronics and Arthur P. Salsberg took over as Editor in 1974. Salsberg and Technical Editor, Leslie Solomon, brought back the featured construction projects.
Popular Electronics needed a computer project so they selected Ed Robert's
Altair 8800 computer based on the improved
Intel 8080 processor. The January 1975 issue of
Popular Electronics had the Altair computer on the cover and this launched the home computer revolution.
In the 1960s the covers featured a large image of the feature story, usually a construction project. When Snitzer was editor (1971-1974) the large photos were gone, replaced by a textual list of articles. The magazine title also changed to an underlined serif font. The magazine changed from digest size to letter size in August 1974.
Personal Computers
There is debate about what machine was the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 (1975), the Mark-8 (1974), or even back to
Kenbak-1 (1971). The computer in the January 1975 issue of captured the attention of the 400,000 or so readers of
Popular Electronics. Before then, home computers were lucky to sell a hundred units. The Altair sold thousands in the first year. By the end of 1975 there were a dozen companies producing computer kits and peripherals.
The February 1975 issue featured an 'All Solid-State TV Camera" by three
Stanford University students; Terry Walker, Harry Garland and Roger Melen. While the camera kit was designed to use an oscilloscope the article mentions it could be connected to the Altair computer. It soon was, the authors got one of the first Altair computers and designed an interface for the camera. They also designed a full color video display for the Altair, "The TV Dazzler", that appeared on the cover of the February 1976 issue. This was the start of
Cromemco, a computer company that grew to over 500 employees by 1983.
The internet didn't exist in 1975 but
time-sharing computers did. With a
computer terminal and a
modem a user could dial into a large multi-user computer.
Lee Felsenstein wanted make low cost versions of modems and terminals available to hobbyist. The March 1976 issue had the "Pennywhistle Modem" and the July 1976 issue had the "SOL Intelligent Terminal" The SOL, built by
Processor Technology, was really an Altair compatible computer and became one of the most successful personal computers at that time.
Popular Electronics had many other computer projects such as the Altair 680, the Speechlab voice recognition board and the
COSMAC ELF. They didn't have the field to themselves. A dedicated computer magazine,
Byte, was started in September 1975. It was soon followed by other new magazines. By the end of 1977, fully assembled computers such as
Apple II, Radio Shack
TRS-80, and the
Commodore PET were on the market. Building computer kits was soon replaced by plugging in assembled boards.
Computers & Electronics
Popular Electronics continued with a full range of construction projects using the newest technologies such as microprocessors and other programmable devices. In November 1982 the magazine became
Computers & Electronics. There were more equipment reviews and fewer construction projects. One of the last major projects was a bidirectional Analog to Digital converter for the Apple II computer published in July and August of 1983. Art Salsberg left at the end of 1983 and Seth R. Alpert became editor. The magazine dropped all project articles and just reviewed hardware and software. The circulation was almost 600,000 in January 1985 when Forrest Mims wrote about the tenth anniversary of the Altair 8800 computer.
In October 1984 Art Salsberg started a competing magazine,
Modern Electronics. Editor Alexander W. Burawa and contributors Forrest Mims, Len Feldman, and Glenn Hauser moved to
Modern Electronics. Here is how Art Salsberg described the new magazine.
Directed to enthusiasts like yourselves, who savor learning more about the latest developments in electronics and computer hardware, Modern Electronics shows you what's new in the world of electronics/computers, how this equipment works, how to use them, and construction plans for useful electronic devices.
Many of you probably know of me from my decade-long stewardship of Popular Electronics magazine, which changed its name and editorial philosophy last year to distance itself from active electronics enthusiasts who move fluidly across electronics and computer product areas. In a sense, then, Modern Electronics is the successor to the original concept of Popular Electronics …
The last issue of
Computers & Electronics was April 1985. Editor Seth R. Alpert was missing from the
masthead. The magazine's demise was due the intense competition in computer magazines, the defection of the magazine staff, and major changes in Ziff-Davis Publishing.
Ziff-Davis asset sale
In 1953,
William B. Ziff, Jr. (age 23) was thrust into the publishing business when his father died of a heart attack. In 1982, Ziff was diagnosed with prostate cancer so he asked his three sons (ages 14 to 20) if they wanted to run a publishing empire. They did not. Ziff wanted to simplify the estate by selling some of the magazines. In November 1984,
CBS bought the consumer group for $362.5 million and
Rupert Murdoch bought the business group for $350 million.
This left Ziff-Davis with the computer group and the database publisher (Information Access Company.) These groups were not profitable. Ziff took time off to successfully battle the prostate cancer. (He lived until 2006.) When he returned he focused on magazines like
PC Magazine and
MacUser to rebuild Ziff-Davis. In 1994 he and his sons sold Ziff-Davis for $1.4 billon.
Gernsback Publications
The title
Popular Electronics was sold to Gernsback Publications and their
Hands-On Electronics magazine was renamed to
Popular Electronics in February 1989. This version was published until it was merged with
Electronics Now to become
Poptronics in January 2000. In late 2002 Gernsback Publications went out of business and the January 2003
Poptronics was the last issue.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Popular Electronics'.
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