The "glamour" of 1980s computer magazines

Ah, the 1980s! The decade of decadence. Suits with shoulder pads. Dance music workouts with Jane Fonda in leg-warmers. Home computers with rudimentary graphics and sound. *record scratch* Wait. Home computers? How do you make those beige plastic boxes with cassette recorders and televisions for monitors look glamorous? That was the challenge facing publishers of the many magazines that sprang up to entertain and inform the burgeoning mass of "home computer enthusiasts".

Thanks to the Internet Archive, we can take a dive back in to the heady days of early-1980s home computing magazines and explore the styles and, yes, glamour of the era.

First up, a category I'm calling Man and Machine. It's about as basic as you could get and consists of photos of men using, standing next to, or gazing contemplative at computers.

As you can see, beards were very much de rigueur for the discerning man about home computing town. It was also a very serious pursuit requiring a great deal of intellectual concentration. For some reason, it was also important to be well dressed. No casual clothing for these deep thinkers of the 80s computer revolution.

These sober and serious micro men gave off a bit of a vibe that, these days, might be seen as "gatekeeping". Some of the magazines took the opposite approach and went with the idea that these new-fangled computer thingies are "so easy, even a child could use one".

Home computers in the 1980s were sold on basically two premises. One was that they could help you with your family finances and the other was that they were "educational". The fact that 95% of them would end up being used just to play games was somewhat glossed over. Computers were going to be essential in the world of tomorrow and parents needed to invest in a one for the home or condemn their offspring to a life of drudgery. Probably working for bosses with computer skills, beards and seriously contemplative faces.

Computers were there to be learned about in their own right but also to act as teacher's assistant with educational games such as the famous Oregon Trail (famous in the US anyway, I don't remember it being a thing in the UK when I was a child). Whatever it was they were up to, the kids in 80s computer magazines were always shown as being rapt and adept. And, in the case of the girl on the cover of Interface Age above, a little bit sinister like she's just figured out how to transfer money from the family finance software into her piggy-bank.

The next group of cover is The Illustrator’s Delight. When you'd given up on trying to make a beige box photogenic you could always rely on the hand of an artist to bring a little magic to your magazine covers. I have no idea what the art direction process was like on these jobs but I like to think that the briefs were decidedly vague and the artist was afforded a great deal of flexibility. Remember, these magazines were trying to stand out on the shelves of newsagents so the more vibrant the colours and the quirkier the style, the better they could attract the eye of the 1980s home computer fan.

A bizarre category of cover next : Apes and Computers. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently linking a home computer to the hairier members of the hominid family but here we have a chimp and a couple of gorillas getting their nerd on. It was around about this time that one of the most popular TV adverts in the UK featured a family of chimps dressed up in human clothes in order to sell tea. Maybe it was just that monkeys were a very 1980s thing like blue eyeshadow and primary colours.

Our penultimate category now and we're getting some of that "glamour" that was promised in the headline. It's a section entitled: Bring On The Girls!

It's a well-known cliche that sex sells and what better way to sell your computer magazine to those technology-loving nerds than with a pretty girl on the cover?

Computing Today has gone all out with the bondage princess vibe that would end up unfortunately dominating women's roles in fantasy gaming for the next forty years. Microcomputing magazine shows us how the glass ceiling would become a thing of the past with women allowed to use computers in the office but only as something on which to rest a letterbox. No, I don't understand what's happening there either. Maybe the photographer was asked to illustrate the concept of electronic mail but nobody thought to tell him they'd changed the cover story until it was too late.

PCM and 80-US magazines both elected to show us how a lady could use a computer and still have fun and be sexy at the same time. And the Japanese magazines were just Japanese. I've tried using Google Translate but I still can't see any link between the topics and the photos on the covers. It must have been quite freeing to be a Japanese magazine cover artist in the 1980s. Just stick whatever you like on there, it'll be fine.

And finally, the category that inspired this whole article : Mad German Magazine Covers.

Today's marketers would probably describe these as "lifestyle" images designed to showcase the way that computers could fit in to your exciting every day life. You could also describe them as "computers in random places for no obvious reason". Why is that couple taking their Dragon 32 on holiday with them? And why have they piled it on top of their suitcases in a precarious and unprotected manner?

Why has that woman taken her ZX Spectrum out for an autumnal walk in the park?

And what can be said about the cover featuring Facial Herr and his scantily-clad lady friend in bed with their Commodore Vic-20? There's a certain "amateur" vibe to it, isn't there? You can probably come up with your own innuendos involving hardware, dongles, debuggers etc

And there ends our trip down magazine memory lane. Why not take a look at the Internet Archive's collection and see if you can find any more bizarre examples of 80s computer magazines. Leave a comment below if you do find any.