Magazines of Yesteryear - PC Pro Issue 1 - November 1994

PC Pro is the only monthly general computing magazine left in the UK and as it nears its 30th birthday, I thought I would try and revisit the first issue. I was a mere month in to college life (focusing on A-level Geology - not even Russell Watson could warble about the long road from there to Software QA tester!) when this first hit the newsstands, and although I have no memory of Windows Magazine, seeing this on the shelves of Consett's biggest newsagent (back when such establishments were a thing) made it an instant purchase. This isn't that particular copy - time, house moves, and poorly organised hoarding skills have all contributed to that loss - and I did pay slightly more than £2.25 for this copy, but it's issue one of PC Pro! Aside from the missing Gateway 2000 insert, everything else is present and correct, even the cover CD, so what does the magazine promise?

No need to speak to your newsagent about the missing disc here.

POWER 486's, and to be fair, in late 1994 a DX2/66 was the sweet spot for desktop computing - the early Pentiums were not terribly good value yet as we shall see, even if there was one reviewed here for £1,199. A four speed CD drive, Texas Instruments multimedia notebook, and a discussion on 32-bit operating systems (how quaint, and I say this as a regular RISC OS user) round off the cover stars. Oh, and a competition to win a Pentium PC-TV! I'll explain that later for the younglings amongst you. 

Much like its contemporaries, PC Pro was the bane of Posties everywhere, starting off at just over 400 pages. Most of the editorial content was in the front two thirds, with the back taken up by the ads, although there were a fair few of those dotted around in general.

That's one hell of an advertisers list.

Launch editor Barry Plows kicks off proceedings with a look at the forthcoming year and the continued dominance of Microsoft and Intel. Aiding them would be the focus on Plug and Play. Such simplicity was long overdue, and the combination of hardware partners and Microsoft's new Windows 95 OS would bring some degree of PnP to the market. Oaks, acorns and all that.

Then...

And now. Some familiar names too.

The news section leads with coverage of that same topic, as well as what would define 'PC '95'. As you can see, they were an advancement on what the market was then offering and would make the Windows PC even more appealing to home users. 

HP was dropping Canon from their new colour laser offering, picking Konica for the laser printer engine in it's £5,850 Color Laserjet. There was also news of a 128-bit graphics card. With up to 8Mb of VRAM, 32Mb of DRAM and 2Mb of Mask DRAM, the Imagine-128 card was set to cost £650-ish. A professional card if ever there was one, it marked the continuation of a ramping up of specs for future graphical wonders. 

OS/2 version 3 was due out in October, beating Windows 95 by a decent length. Also known as Warp, it did see some traction in the UK. I'm sure Escom offered it as an option for their high-street range, and I was a semi-regular user over the following couple of years, much preferring it to Win 95, but Microsoft would prevail. 

It turned out there wasn't a Dr. in the house when Novell announced the discontinuation of DR-DOS. After struggling to gain even 10% market share, the forthcoming Win 95 would seal the fate of any DOS, and it didn't helped that Microsoft hadn't played fair the previous few years - demanding a licence fee from manufacturers even when their DOS wasn't supplied! They got told off for that, but it was too late for Novell, just as it would be for IBM and OS/2. 

Talk of an add-on CD-i card for PC's seemed to buoy fans of Philips' multimedia monster - not that anyone else cared. If you had a suitable PC for such a card, you already had access to better software than the CD-i could provide. The same would go for the Creative 3DO Blaster mentioned in the story too. 

A comment from the US about the seemingly lethargic advancements of the PowerPC consortium raises an eyebrow. Although it makes a good point about lacking a speed advantage over Intel's cheaper options, they did help keep the Mac afloat for a few more years. I say help, because Apple really tried its best to commit seppuku in the 90's. 

It was the disappointingly mediocre of times, it was the better than average of times.

The big review test next and just have a look at those names! Amstrad, Apricot, Dan, Elonex, Evesham, Locland, Mitac, MJN, Panrix and Viglen - all UK brands that, at various points of the 90's offered reasonable, if not spectacular hardware. Then there were the international marques such as AST, Brother, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, IBM, NEC and Tulip. Prices ranged fro £1,249 (Mitac) to £2,305 (NEC), with most coming in between £1,400 to £1,800 ish. The round up requested 8Mb of RAM, 400Mb-ish of storage, a 15-inch monitor, a secondary cache and VESA Local Bus/PCI - integrated local bus was also permitted. Some included CD-ROM drives, and most were generally decent. Two awards were given: Panrix received one for Speed, offering a 4Mb hard drive cache, SCSI controller and Diamond Stealth graphics, all for £1,799, whilst Gateway took the Value nod, yours for £1,508. Either would have seen you well served. Honourable mentions went to Compaq, AST and IBM. 

Once company who didn't do well was Amstrad. Their 9486 suffered from slow speed, poor monitor and a terrible keyboard. That and a cost of £1,399.99 meant that it's two star score was really bad. It also served to show how far the 80's giant had fallen. Once the market leader in well-priced PC compatibles, it was now just another box shifter, costing more than some and offering less than most. 

Winner, winner, PC-TV dinner!

Competition time! Your chance to win the "The Ultimate Multimedia PC" - Peter Sissons not included. Win either an ICL Pentium or 486-based PC-TV plus the full Microsoft Office Professional and a bundle of five CD-ROMS. Ten runners up would bag the software alone, and the total giveaway was valued at £10k! Not a bad bunch of swag, and for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the PC-TV was a fad (come on, it really was) of trying to combine, as the name suggests, your PC and television in a multimedia menagerie. It wasn't a wholly bad concept, but never quite gelled. The questions, by the way, aren't too hard, and the second has possibly the best "wrong answer" of the lot - Microsoft Office is... an anagram of "The Devil's Work." Good call, PC Pro, good call.

ES(y)COM, ES(y)-go.

On to the Reviews section, and the varied selection kicks off with the ESCOM Pentium P60. At £1,199 ex VAT (£1,409 inc), it's cheap for a Pentium, but with two stars out of six, not recommended. Too many corners cut (4Mb of RAM, bad monitor and keyboard, and limited expansion) led Jon Honeyball to advise that if the price was all you can afford, get a more balanced 486 system. Apricot's XEN PC LS 560 is another Pentium 60 system but arrives at £2,619 ex (£3,077 inc). Here though, the extra money delivers a system worthy of five stars out of six and demonstrates the purpose of the next generation of Intel processors. You just have to pay for the privilege.

ELONEX! Ah-ha, Ah-ha! Elonex is gonna rock ya! (Apologies to KLF)

Elonex have a rather decent 486 workstation, whilst Dan Technology's Dantium (see what they did there) 90 lacks the oomph for such high end kit, eclipsed by the only slightly more expensive (but much faster Apricot XEN). ICL's middling MD 60V is another P60 system and defines average, scoring threes across the board, where as Texas Instruments Travelmate 4000M delivers a multimedia laptop (if you buy the docking station which includes the CD-ROM drive) for a grand total of £3,700 ex VAT (£4,344 inc). It's a 486 system with too little RAM but a respectable (for the period and the technology) three and a half hour battery life. 

I mean, it's lovely and all, but you wouldn't want to travel with it, mate.

Brother and Dell rock up with 486 portables at the upper end of the price scale (£2,339 and £2,899 ex respectively), neither of which would disgrace your lap (that doesn't sound right, does it?), and Hewlett Packard's latest A3 laser printer, the Laserjet 4V delivers cracking quality and value for under £2k ex. Adaptec's ReadySCSI Plug and Play SCSI Adaptor offers a glimpse of the PnP future (but really needs Chicago - aka Windows 95) to prove what it can really do, whilst Intel's 14.4 PCMCIA Fax/Modem receives reasonable praise for offering travellers an outside connection. The cover-featured Toshiba quad-speed CD-ROM drive proves a disappointment - it's expensive (£400-ish) and hogs the CPU too much.

Referring back to multimedia and PC-TV shenanigans, Miro's DC1 TV capture card offered superb quality video catpure (and a copy of Adobe's Premiere 1.1) for £799 inc - proving that such marvels could be had, but you needed to spend some serious cash first. There again, it was cheaper than many professional set ups so if you required the capability, it was a no-brainer. 

"When Ah were lad, we had reet proper databases."

On the software side of things, Freehand 4 (£450 ex, £529 inc) took care of your graphics needs, Omnis 7 Version 3 could handle your database requirements for £3,995 ex(!), Sidekick for Windows had your personals organised for less than a ton, and Quickbooks 2 sorted your finances for £128 ex (£150 inc). This highlights something that many modern users won't notice - the total cost of ownership. If you were to buy a Windows or Linux PC these days, there'd be either software already installed or free open source options available for almost any requirement. The same can be said for Mac, Chromebooks and RISC OS machines. There are some (relatively) niche or professional software cases where you'd have to pay, either up front or a subscription service, but on the whole, buying today has you covered out of the box. A quick check of the likes of Evesham Micros shows that adding Works for Windows would add an extra £90 ex VAT onto your initial purchase price, so (relative) youngsters may need to understand that the hardware was only part of the buying process and additional packages could be very pricey, depending upon your use cases. 

32-bits? What has it ever done for us, eh?

The first of the features now and a piece on 32-bit operating systems. Truly one of the things hampering the PC (as opposed to the Mac and then still extant Acorn) was the kludge that was the DOS and Windows set up. Within a year of this issue's publication date, that would cease to be such an concern (hey, 95 wasn't that bad - it had its "features" but on the whole, a decent first/second/third attempt...). 

The final two features cast their light upon Parallel port expansion and digital video. The former is rather quaint, living as we do in a USB world these days (I know, but back then you had parallel, serial, SCSI, ADB, PS/2 and other more fanciful ports, so connectivity was a tad more "involved" than it is now, and that's before we get to the config!). The latter tries to convince readers that DV on your PC is a thing - in truth it was but it also meant much gold being exchanged. Even the initial numbers for the tech needed are impressive (this is before encoding, and times have changed), as a single frame of PAL video was 768 x 576 pixels at 24-bit colour, meaning 1.3Mb per frame. 66Mb per second, 4Gb per minute and 248Gb per hour! Without sound. Now, of course, encoding is your friend here, and the technology was advancing at a brisk rate. The future looked bright and as costs dropped, the capabilities on offer would improve rapidly. 

You could just stare at this background for ages!

Ah, Real World Computing, a selection of columns offering tips, news, advice, experiences and the like. Some of the names here are still writing for PC Pro (Messers Honeyball and Winder specifically, and I should have mentioned Mr Pountain, the current PC Pro's Editorial Fellow), although the titles of the columns have changed slightly - OS/2 being the most obvious to have departed. 

Ah, the innocent days of Wing Commander. Long before whatever Star Citizen is. 

It wasn't all serious stuff though, as the games section proves. There's news of Dark Forces (which has recently received the full on remaster treatment), Wing Commander Armada and Wing Commander 3. Tie Fighter rightly receives a glowing review, and there's updates on Win G (a 32-bit graphics/games shell for Chicago/Windows 4/Win 95), Harvester, DOOM II, and System Shock. A final piece on the nature of using a Pentium for gaming centres on Magic Carpet and how the new generation of Pentium processors who keep the PC well ahead of the next generation of games consoles - Sony's PSX (PlayStation), Nintendo's Project Reality (Ultra 64, later N64) and Panasonic's M2, the last of which never made it to the consumer market. 

The final piece of editorial content is Ctrl-Alt-Del, a humorous coda to the magazine, asking whether Windows was a virus (nope, as viruses tend to have a better update schedule that Windows, otherwise they accomplish the same things), news of receiving twenty copies of Sidekick mis-addressed to a completely different continent, and what might now be considered an off-key comment about the Rolling Stones now having an internet presence. Oh little did they know the lengths Microsoft would go to to promote the new Start button in Win 95...

The included cover CD is a wealth of mid-90's fun. The highlight is Astound for Windows, a multimedia presentation tool for those of you who were tired of Powerpoint's old schtick. An exclusive pop video from Drake (not that one), a demo of Universal Word (a multilingual word processor) and a demo of Star Crusader almost wrap up the goodies. We mustn't forget about the selection of Windows sounds and 20 True Type fonts, either! 

As always, it's now time for the adverts, and I pretty much covered this period with my Computer Shopper  issue 80 look back last July, but there are still some observations to make. 

Danger, Will Robinson!

Escom were making themselves well known (besides the overly cheap P60) with an ad whose colours suggest the "endangered toxic frog" aesthetic. This was before they tried to establish a retail wing using former Radio Rentals stores (even Stanley had one... briefly), but their time in the sun would be short. 

Obviously the ad-line doesn't refer to upgrades.

Colossus advertised a full range of desktops, starting at just £699 ex for a 25MHz 486 SX (which Crown pictured further below matched), marking the starting point for any reasonable PC spec. Memory was a pricey upgrade (£150 ex for 4Mb), and they included PC-DOS rather than MS' varient alongside Windows 3.1. Those "Portable" machines are certainly an option, but the additional costs for a TFT screen are eye-watering! There again, there is something truly magnificent about a gas plasma display. Not to use, you understand, just to bask in its retro-chic glow. 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Apricot's advert seems more appropriate to an opticians eye test, and even my basic accessibility testing skills are screaming "No!" to that colour ensemble. They were a smidge more expensive than the low end box-shifters but there is something about that low profile case that still appeals to this day. 

That's 'king cheap from Crown.

Speaking of low-end, Crown were a budget range, and their 486 SX33 is a very nicely priced offering... unless you wanted any real expansion options, but for a basic Windows machine, it did enough. 

'King cheaper, 'king no chance!

Let's just say IBM had budgets of all sizes covered.

Not doubting the quality, really doubting the value though.

For the same price, you could get a Compaq Contura i386SL laptop from P&P, but to be honest, the era of 386 machines were over. And for all I like the all-in-one design ethos, that Compaq 486 for £599 was far too limited. As I navigate my mid-40's, the thought of a 14-inch CRT makes me shudder. At least they were better than Amstrad's ability to bundle their machines with 10-inch displays!

You can get these Computers, By Post!

Computers By Post were a great source of big name brands, and although these weren't the cheapest of options out there, if you wanted a "name" then CBP were an obvious choice. 

What is it with RISC advertising? Acorn's in the late 80's were similarly drab.

Motorola must have heard in advance about the criticisms of it's PowerPC range of processors as they have a double page spread to show off how good they could be, or at least tempt people to try a machine powered by one - aka a Mac.

Finally, just because it's there, here's a reminder of the Olivetti Echos. Is it not a thing of beauty???

Swoon!

That's PC Pro issue one. A brilliant start to a magazine that is still going strong and which hopefully will celebrate its 30th birthday later this year. Long may it continue. As always with looking back at old computer magazines, it's partially a nostalgia trip but also a way of reminding myself (and by extension you, gentle reader), that the story of general computing in the UK is long, involved and fascinating. It has indeed been a long road, getting from there to here...