Nibble

» see nibble-magazine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mike Harvey quit a job at Inforex late in 1979 with an idea that sounds thin written down: a magazine for Apple II owners in which the main article each month is a program. Not a review of a program, not news about one. The actual listing, written for that issue and printed across several pages, with an explanation of how it worked running alongside it. He gave himself ninety days and the first issue was dated january 1980. He had hoped for a thousand subscribers and had six thousand inside half a year.

The name is a joke that everyone in the audience already knew. A nibble is half a byte, four bits, which tells you exactly who the magazine was addressed to. It came out eight times a year at first and went monthly in 1984, published from Lincoln, Massachusetts under an outfit called MicroSPARC, a name Harvey later gave up because Sun Microsystems wanted it for a processor.

What made it different from the rest of the type-in press was the second half of the deal. Plenty of magazines printed code. Nibble printed code and then told you why the code was shaped that way, in enough detail that you finished the article able to write the next one yourself. The program was the excuse. The teaching was the product, and the audience was people who had bought an Apple II with no computing background at all and had to learn the machine from a newsstand.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day it died ~

Two things ended it and neither was a mistake anyone made. The Apple II went from being the machine everyone had to being the machine in the back of the classroom, and Apple's own attention had moved to the Macintosh years earlier. At the same time the big publishing houses arrived in the computer category with sales forces and page rates that a one-man operation in Massachusetts could not match on the newsstand.

Harvey sold off his other titles to larger publishers through the late 1980s and kept Nibble for last. The july 1992 issue went out and that was the end of it. He described the closing as feeling like a death in the family, which is an unusual thing for a publisher to say out loud about a magazine that had simply run out of readers. He died on the last day of 2019.

~ what it was actually selling ~

I learned to program in a country and a decade where none of this existed. By 1998 a modem was the delivery mechanism and code was something you found, on a forum or in a badly scanned book, already written by somebody who was not going to explain it to you. Turkish forums of that era were extraordinary for hardware and thin for craft. You could get an answer in ten minutes and almost never a reason.

That is the thing Nibble was selling that has never quite come back. There is more source code available to anybody with a connection now than the entire run of the magazine contained, and the ratio has gone the other way: the code is infinite and free, the walkthrough of why it is built like that is the scarce part. The reason people paid for a magazine to hand-copy a program out of it was never the program.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »