Magical Monthly Magazines

Every year is special in its own way, but some stand out in my mind more than others. Take 1969, for example. That was a good one that was jam-packed with transformative “happenings,” just a few cherry-picked examples of which are as follows:

Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Humanity’s first footsteps on another world: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, with Armstrong’s iconic “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” becoming a defining phrase of the era. The mission was watched by hundreds of millions worldwide and marked a pinnacle of the space race.

Woodstock Music & Art Fair: Billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,” this countercultural festival drew up to half a million people to a farm in Bethel, New York, becoming a cultural touchstone for a generation. Despite logistical chaos, mud, and rain, its spirit endured and was immortalized in film and music history.

First Message over ARPANET: The precursor to today’s internet began when the first message (“LO”, an attempted “LOGIN”) was sent between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. That small, glitchy start launched the global digital information age.

Concorde’s Maiden Flight: The prototype of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde 001, took to the skies from Toulouse, France, beginning the story of commercial supersonic passenger travel.

Boeing 747’s First Flight: The prototype “City of Everett” made its maiden flight, introducing the “jumbo jet” and heralding a new era in mass long-haul air travel with its wide-body design.

The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The final public performance of The Beatles, held atop the Apple Corps building in London, was an impromptu, historic moment captured for the Let It Be film and etched into music lore.

Sesame Street: The premiere of the groundbreaking educational children’s television show that combined entertainment and pedagogy, influencing generations with characters like Big Bird, Bert & Ernie, and Mr. Hooper.

I Turn Twelve: In the same year humans first set foot on the Moon, Concorde took flight, and half a million free spirits gathered at Woodstock, young Clive “Max” Maxfield (that’s me!) celebrated his 12th trip around the Sun. Little did the world know that this budding engineer would one day write a series of Throwback Thursday columns about the very era he was growing up in.

In the case of the first moon landing, by 9:00 p.m. in the UK, I was already tucked up in bed when my dear old dad called me back downstairs to join him and my mum in our family room. They were watching a special continuous broadcast on the BBC that was linked to NASA’s feed from the US and mixed with commentary from James Burke, Patrick Moore, and Cliff Michelmore.

My dad got two shot glasses. He filled one with whisky (for him) and dribbled a hint of a whiff of a sniff into the other (for me), but we didn’t touch them yet.

The Lunar Module (LM), nicknamed Eagle, was docked to the Command and Service Module (CSM), Columbia, during the trip from Earth to the Moon. When the LM eventually undocked from the CSM and began its descent to the Moon’s surface, my dad told me that we were watching one of the most amazing events in human history.

I remember that occasion as though it were today. We all held our breath for the last few seconds. And we all cheered when the LM finally touched down with only a few seconds of fuel to spare, at which point Dad and I toasted each other with our whisky. It was the first time I’d ever had alcohol. It made my eyes water. Even now, a little tear comes to my eye when I rewatch the landing and hear Neil Armstrong say those iconic words: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

As I mentioned in my Vunderful Vacuum Tubes column, another notable event that occurred in 1969 was when my parents gifted me with subscriptions, in my name, to two august hobby magazines: Practical Electronics and Practical Wireless. I was just thinking about these magazines, which sparked the idea for this column.

First, it’s necessary to note that there wasn’t much entertainment available outside of what people created for themselves in those days. At that time, for example, England had only three TV channels: BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV. (And BBC Two didn’t really count because it was boring!) Also, people were used to doing “things” for themselves. This helps to explain why newsagents were packed with magazines covering a tremendous range of hobbies, and people really looked forward to receiving and reading the next issue for their favorite field of endeavor.

Starting at the beginning of each month, I’d pop into our local newsagent on the way home to check if either of my magazines had arrived. If so, I’d race home and read it cover to cover. One magazine had a regular column: “Take Twenty: Less than 20 components and less than 20 shillings.” This was when England was still using the “old currency” that we called “pounds, shillings, and pence,” and there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings (240 pennies) in a pound. In 1971, England retired the old currency and officially adopted a decimal system in which a pound was equal to 100 “new pennies,” but that’s a story for another day.

As soon as the weekend came, I’d catch a bus down to my local electronics store to purchase the parts to build the latest and greatest “Take 20” project (see also my Eclectic Electronic Emporiums column).

I recall many things about those magazines from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I also asked some of my friends to share their own recollections. A highly cut-down summary of our brain-stem-storming session is as follows:

Almost all the projects were analog (radio or music-related) in the 1960s. Also, many were based on vacuum tubes. Transistor-based projects started to appear in the latter half of the 1960s, while digital projects and 7400-series digital integrated circuits (ICs) increasingly made their presence felt throughout the 1970s.

The authors of many of the projects were themselves hobbyists. They often constructed the projects they wrote about using components from their personal treasure chest of parts. An interesting byproduct of this was that some of these components were difficult for the rest of us to find.

Building on the previous point, each issue typically included a page devoted to sourcing hard-to-find components, along with recommendations for specific suppliers.

Today, we expect everything to happen immediately. Things moved a lot slower in those days, not least that the primary form of communication was snail mail. People would write letters to the editor, with selected portions appearing on a “Letters to the Editor” page several months later. “Conversations” between the editor and an irate reader could span many months before one or both became fatigued and decided to move on with their lives.

Also, now that I come to think about it, everything was much more formal back then. This included the articles themselves, but it was particularly prevalent in the case of communications to the editor. An (obviously fictitious) example might read something like the following:

Sir, I read with great interest the recent missive from Messrs. Higgins & Sons regarding their novel arrangement of two crystal detectors in parallel. While I applaud their ingenuity, I feel compelled to point out, with the most tremendous respect, that such a configuration, when employed in close proximity to a budgerigar of nervous disposition, may lead to unforeseen consequences, as evidenced by the unfortunate incident in my own workshop last Tuesday.

Yours faithfully,

E. Percival Throttle, Esq.

Small Heath, Birmingham

Hobby magazines were jam-packed with adverts. But these weren’t seen as annoying distractions in the same way that they are commonly perceived today. Instead, readers devoured the adverts as avidly as they did the articles, drooling over every picture and savoring every word.

When it came to ordering components from suppliers (for parts that weren’t available from your local electronics shop), you’d fill out an order form (often cut out from the magazine) and include remuneration in the form of a postal order. This was like a paper check that you purchased from your local post office for a small fee.

There’s an old saying that “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be,” but I don’t agree. Just writing this column has made me feel very nostalgic indeed. The great thing is that you can peruse and ponder some of these magazines yourself. There’s an awesome website called World Radio History.

This is a nonprofit, free online library of radio, music, television, and related industry publications — preserving tens of thousands of back issues and making them searchable and readable. It was built and is maintained by David E. F. Gleason and collaborators with the goal of “setting the record straight” on broadcast history.

The site’s structure is organized by geography and topic: for example, it has dedicated portals for the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Oceania, and Latin America (under “World Pages”), as well as specialized sections for amateur radio, broadcasting industry, music-related publications, and more.

Within those collections are hundreds of individual magazines, including Practical Electronics (from the 1960s to the 1990s) and Practical Wireless (from the 1930s to the 1990s).

BE CAREFUL! You can lose a lot of time on this site. For example, I just started reading the October 1st, 1932, issue of Practical Wireless. Until now, I had no idea that this used to be a weekly publication in those days of yore!

On the other hand... it would be great if you could take the time to review some of these old magazines and then let me know your thoughts about them. As always, I welcome your captivating comments, querulous questions, and sagacious suggestions, all of which you can share on Hackster's "Throwback Thursdays" Discord channel. I look forward to seeing you there.

P.S. Don't forget that you can peruse and ponder all of my Throwback Thursdays columns here.