Computeractive's birthday: Seventh heaven

Jump in a time machine and nip back to 1997. On arriving, bestow an enormous budget on a gathering of creatives and lock them away for a few months with a brief to do something that will capture the public's imagination, and what would you get?

The obvious answer, of course, is a decision to continue with the Millennium Dome project, the upshot of a government-initiated review of the endeavour's feasibility and eventual desirability to the public at large. Well, not all ideas are spot on.

At around the same time, another group of hip young gunslingers were secreted in a dark basement in London's Soho and told they wouldn't be released until they'd created a new kind of magazine. More specifically, a computer magazine that normal, everyday folk could understand and enjoy. Desperate for daylight, the team toiled for close to a year, emerging on Thursday, 12 February 1998 clutching hot-off-the-press copies of issue one.

Seemingly, they'd done good. Overnight, their creation became the best-selling consumer technology magazine, attracting hundreds of thousands more readers than the incumbent market-leaders. Moreover, it was the first, and only, computer magazine to be awarded the Plain English Campaign's Crystal Mark, for its easy-to-read use of the language and lack of jargon.

Back to the future and you're reading the seventh-birthday issue of that same publishing success story. So join us as we take a trip down memory lane and explore just how the computer industry has evolved over the past seven years, and how those changes were reported by Computeractive.

Rage against the machine
Back in the 1990s a trend appeared to be emerging among the world's white-collar workers. Some office denizens, frustrated by their own inability to master the machines with which they were required to work, were resorting to violence.

As an extreme example, one American chap, apparently unable to calmly consider options like reading his software manuals or calling a telephone helpline any longer, pulled out a gun and shot his computer several times in the fascia. His wife's attempts to stop him simply resulted in more bullets being fired at the defenceless PC. Even if Microsoft's Windows Firewall had been around in 1998, it wouldn't have protected this computer from such an attack.

This new and worrying syndrome was dubbed 'computer rage', and it was the focus of our first-ever cover. Atop the image of an angered computer user throwing his PC from a high window, our headline promised "You can beat it". Inside, our investigators reported the results of interviews with sufferers of techno-stress and consultations with psychologists in an attempt to help readers identify and deal with symptoms of computer rage.

Fortunately, in the seven years since we haven't come across any similar cases of computer-cide, so perhaps Windows XP is easier to use than we all realise.

Plummeting prices
In need of a new computer, the American shoot-em-up fan mentioned above would have been heartened by the lead news story in the first issue of Computeractive: it offered the prospect of being able to pick up a PC package for less than £500 before the year was out.

Based on analysis of component prices and fluctuations in currency valuations conducted by market research outfit Dataquest, the prediction was that computer shoppers could expect to obtain big-brand Pentium II-based systems at this budget price within months.

And so it came to pass: in October of the same year, we embarked on our first group test of sub-£500 PCs. The best contender was served up by little-known (and long since deceased) outfit ASK Computers. In 1998, £499 spent with this firm would have bought you a Pentium II 266MHz computer with 32Mb of memory and 3.2Gb of hard disk space. In our upcoming issue, we'll be taking a fresh look at bargain-basement PCs, so be sure to pick up a copy to find out exactly how far computer technology has progressed.

Gone in the blink of an eye
Sadly, our crack reporters were sometimes prone to cracking up. Fortunately, well hidden toward the back of Computeractive issue one nestled a little feature about a 'switched on' technology called MiniDisc. OK, so Sony's attempt at a recordable digital-audio format to rival CD was already six years old, but one of our wishes-to-remain-nameless writers confidently reported that the format's time had arrived.

Soon after, it wearily departed - commercially speaking, at least - dragging its tired, proprietary legs away from the rampant, digital music free-for-all that remains the MP3 format.

Given MiniDisc's subsequent and rapid commercial demise, it's something of a shame that we couldn't apply to that report techniques demonstrated in the debut Computeractive workshop, 'Ex-ing your ex'. Long before digital cameras were the best-sellers they are now, we showed readers how to scan in a group-shot photograph before removing any unwanted subjects (an old lover, say, hence 'Ex-ing your ex').

Ground-breaking in its day, the workshop still holds water today, demonstrating the use of advanced image-editing tools that have since become standard aspects of even low-cost photo-manipulation software applications. So, if you've just scratched a seven-year itch, the seven-year-old first issue of Computeractive can aid permanent relief.

Flat-lining
While using your computer to manipulate bad memories out of your snapshots these days, it's likely that you'll be doing so on a flat-panel, or TFT, monitor. Seven years ago, though, the cost of such a display would have set you back as much as the PC itself. Indeed, in the entire first year of our existence, we reviewed just a couple of flat-panel monitors, and with good reason - price.

A typical example was Samsung's SyncMaster 500, which we looked at in our third issue. A basic 15in flat-panel monitor, it cost a whimper-inducing £1,000.

However, such high price tags weren't long for this world. In 2001, Hitachi announced that it was ending production of traditional cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) to concentrate instead on the production of flat-panel screens. When a major manufacturer makes a move like this, the supply-and-demand dynamic alters: TFT panels were becoming commodity items, while at the same time the cost of traditional glass-screen monitors rose thanks to the reducing supply of CRTs.

Today, Samsung would sell you a model similar to the SyncMaster 500 for just £180, while lesser-name-brand 15in TFTs can be picked up for little more than a tenth of the typical 1998 purchase price (PC World, for example, is currently knocking out the 15in Proview CY-565 for just £120).

Flailing floppy
In May 2003 we wrote an early obituary for the floppy disk, whose twilight years had stretched far too long for our liking. What, we pondered, was the point of a device able to store little over a single megabyte of data when the measure for hard disk capacities had just topped the hundreds of gigabytes mark?

Highlighting the fact that you'd be lucky to fit a solitary high-resolution digital photograph on a 3.5in floppy, we served up any number of alternatives that readers could employ to store and transport files and folders with much more efficiency and versatility.

Chief among these was cheap recordable CD media. By 2003, the cost of bulk-bought CD-Rs capable of storing 700Mb or more of data had dropped to just a few pence each, making them affordable, disposable substitutes to the feeling-the-squeeze floppy.

We also recommended as alternatives USB memory keys and USB 2-based external hard disk drives, both technologies that did not exist when Computeractive began publishing. Two years ago, a 32Mb USB memory key would have cost you about £35; the same spent today at an online shop, such as Dabs.com, would buy you a 512Mb-capacity key with the faster USB 2 interface. Now, that's progress.

Just before Christmas the same year, major PC manufacturer Dell sounded a louder death knell for floppy disks by announcing that it was dumping 3.5in drives from some of its home computer systems. Like Computeractive before it, Dell cited modern replacements for the floppy disk, not least of which was the increasing spread of broadband.

Boom, bust, boom
Which brings us nicely on to the internet, arguably the most important and interesting technology development of the past seven years. Of course, the internet was already well established by the time we launched - from the off, the magazine featured a section dedicated to all things online - but the dotcom boom (let alone the bust) was yet to happen.

The ensuing two years would see investors the world over lose billions of pounds by supporting thousands of e-ventures whose turnovers often failed to reach even a few-hundred pounds. Who could forget Boo.com, the £100m online clothes shop whose backers lost their shirts? Or Beenz, the online loyalty-scheme-cum-currency launched with £50m of investment money that's now worth, well, beans?

Apparently, almost everyone, as these - and many thousands of daft dotcoms besides - didn't even survive the investment fallout that heralded the dawn of the new millennium.

Remarkably, the bust looks set to turn to boom once more. You might hope that this time around the capital markets would offer a more measured appraisal of the worth of some of today's dotcom stars. Unfortunately, such an expectation may prove naive, with the likes of search company Google already trading with a market capitalisation (or supposed worth) of tens of billions of dollars.

Even so, it's hard now to imagine a world without the internet. Almost every computer user will at some time or other have accessed the online world, be it to read the latest news, look up train times, book cinema tickets, take part in an online auction or buy a book. In short, the web has weaved its way into everyday life.

However, the prevalence of the internet brings with it previously unheard-of threats. A computer hooked up to the internet - be it occasionally using dial-up, or permanently via broadband - is exposed to threats in a way that never existed before its rise.

Computer viruses existed long before we were all connected to the net but their spread is aided by the online world (it's much easier to pick up an infection by absent-mindedly opening an email attachment than physically inserting a floppy disk, for example). In addition, new threats have cropped up: if you've been a regular Computeractive reader over the past seven years then you will have read our numerous news reports, features and workshops on topics such as spyware, spoofing and email scams. Your best bet for remaining alert to these online foes is to stick with Computeractive.

Where are they now?
Inevitably, not every product and company that we've covered has survived to celebrate our seventh birthday. For example, many of our early group tests and reviews pages featured Gateway PCs. No wonder, as at the time the company was a major player in the UK computer market, with a massive mail-order operation and significant retail presence in the nation's high streets.

But seven years on and the Gateway brand, along with its distinctive dairy-cow-inspired livery, is all but forgotten here. As we reported in September 2001, it withdrew from the European market in 2001, citing poor sales.

Another high-profile demise was suffered by the once-mighty Lotus Software, which was gobbled up by IBM. Once highly-popular, the Lotus SmartSuite office package featured in many of our early workshops, but today its remaining users are vastly outnumbered by those who favour the all-conquering Microsoft Office.

An honourable mention is reserved for Netscape, which snatched humiliation from the jaws of glory in the Great Web Browser War of the late-1990s. Microsoft's Internet Explorer not only caught up to Netscape Navigator, but rapidly overtook it as the most popular choice for surfing the net. Soon after, Netscape was acquired by AOL Time Warner and, while Navigator still exists as a browser, it now plays a barely-audible fiddle in an orchestra of new contenders challenging Internet Explorer.

Power of seven
As we've seen, seven years is a long time in computer publishing. Some ideas that seemed cutting-edge in 1998 haven't lasted the distance, while others that we never saw coming are now part of everyday computing. (Who'd have thought that the popular office prank of removing the ball from a colleague's mouse would be rendered impractical by the invention of optical mice. Although you can still have some fun - try slapping some opaque sticky tape over the rodent's seeing eye.)

If you asked us to look ahead to the next seven years we'd say look out for the new version of Windows some time next year, along with inevitable bi-annual updates to Microsoft Office. We'd also keep an eye on the digital-music scene, for it's certain that online music stores will continue to grow in popularity.

With the increasing power and capabilities of mobile phones, we reckon that by 2012 we'll all be streaming high-quality music tracks and videos to our handsets. The PC, meanwhile, will continue to evolve far beyond its original remit: if the phrase 'digital home' isn't as omnipresent in seven years' time as 'internet' is today, we'll eat our mouse mats.