My father was a baker all the time I was growing up. He owned a series of small town bakery shops, in the good ole days when you could actually find a butcher, baker, and candlestick maker without trucking on down to the local mall, but by actually going downtown and shopping.
One of the things that I noticed at home were these funny magazines he would get as a member of the North Bay Baker's Association in Sonoma County, California. These were the trade journals of the baking industry. Some of their editorial content would show the latest baking equipment on the market (industrial strength Mixmasters, ovens large enough to bake dozens of loaves of bread at a time). And there would be the latest tips on how to make a better bagel, or gossip on what is selling hot in Milpitas this month. (Mostly, there were pictures of different groups of bakers on convention somewhere, mostly several sheets to the wind, having a roaring good time, with a suspiciously large cake lurking in the background.)
The computer trade is no difference. Except for the conventions, of course. We all are aware of the popular magazines that focus on our technology. After all, you are reading one right now, aren't you? A trip to any large computer store, or large bookstore, will display dozens of computer magazines, from the ever popular PC Magazine, probably one of the first such magazines to show up dedicated to the IBM PC family, and of course old grandfather Byte, to those rags that focus only on the internet, networking, databases, C language, or other narrow topics.
What most people who are not directly involved in the profession are not aware of are these "controlled circulation" magazines that are available. Mostly these are tabloid newspapers, that come out on a weekly basis, although the granddaddy of this genre is something called Datamation, which has been around since the '50s and is a monthly or biweekly magazine.
This controlled circulation gimmick simply means that, if you can make these guys believe that you actually have some control over your company's purchases, then you can get the magazine for free. To get on their list, first you have to find a copy of the magazine itself. Inside it there is usually a card to send in requesting a subscription. This card, generally covering a whole page, asks you twenty or more questions about just how tall your are in your organization, and to some extent, how tall your organization itself is. The president and CEO of a one man shop can probably get one of these, but just about anybody above the janitor in a real large company qualifies also.
They want to know statistics on how many computers, printers, disk drives, networks, servers, gateways, and consultants you have now, expect to have this year, and are forecasting to have next year. What is your role in this company? What influence do you have? Can you make purchasing decisions, or do you only recommend to somebody taller what to buy?
What amazes me is how they do not seem to keep track of your answers last year, and compare them to this year. I know I don't remember what I said last year, so I just wing it again this year and hope that my answers are somewhere in the ballpark of what I said last year. They cannot possibly be close, but I don't think anybody ever checks. The problem is, you want to fib (excuse me, enhance your position) enough to make them send you the magazine, but not so much that they will laugh themselves silly when they see your application and toss it back in your face.
The magazines that I am talking about here do not seem to appear on the newstand. In fact, they claim that you can buy a subscription, but at the out of this world price of like $150/ year or something. I once tried to have one of these sent to my home instead of my office, and I got a real nasty letter back indicating that no business was registered at my home address (true) and that my request was being rejected. I could not believe that they had access to a database that good, and that they would even bother to check such a thing.
The ones that I subscribe to are PC Week, and Infoworld. Others are the previously mentioned Datamation, ComputerWorld (not a relative of ComputorLink so far as I know), and lots of focused magazines on Netware, Embedded Systems, Networking, specific brands of computer hardware (HP, IBM AS 400) and operating systems (NT, SCO Unix), and specific technologies, like Computer Graphics, CAD, Databases. New ones seem to crawl out of the woodwork on a monthly basis. At first, just about anybody can get on their list, but eventually they have to justify their readership to their advertisers and then you have to go back to being creative about your job class.
Datamation has been around forever, it seems. It was already an old magazine when I was in school learning this stuff. The data processing manager for USF would leave these things laying around, and it was neat to see all the sexy hardware that you would like to get if you were only not a small private Jesuit school, but a neat first class computer place like Cal or Stanford. The best thing about Datamation back then were the cartoons. I have always loved computer cartoons, and have a rather large collection of them grabbed over the years. The pickings are rather slim nowadays, since computers are just part of everyday life now, but back then, in the '60s, computers were still somewhat mystical and not commonplace at all, and the cartoons reflected the bizarre concepts that the man on the street had of the devices, or that even the working professional would like to think people thought that we worked with.
Computerworld, and Datamation, both are more oriented to mainframe computers, but even the mainframe guys have had to come to grips with the fact that PCs are here in force and are not going away, and will be a part of corporate life whether they like it or not.
PC Week, and Inforworld both focus more on the PC world, albeit the corporate world of networks, servers, and big bucks capital spending programs. The ads in these magazines are generally not for something that you can find at your local ComputorLink advertizer's storefront. While they do push the odd laptop, they also are very enthusiastic about the latest network router or how to connect your area to a T3 telephone line.
However, the editorial content is generally quite readable. They have several very interesting columnists that expound on some topic in every issue. The main articles in the issues usually are talking about state of the art types of topics, often even in front of the state of the art. Since the readers often have the ability to spend gobs of thousands of dollars on hardware and software, these magazines try very hard to predict what will be the hot topics in the next few months, so that the reader will have a reasonable chance at spending all that dough wisely. And of course, there is lots of what can only be characterized as industry gossip - who is getting promoted, what company is working on what technology, and what is Bill thinking about for next week.
My favorite magazine of this bunch is currently Infoworld. I just like their columnists better than the ones in the other rags. The focus articles are all about equal quality. All these guys have testing labs that test everything from the latest printer to whole concepts (is Lotus Notes really better than Groupware?).
The most useful PC columnists are Brian Livingston and Brett Glass, both of whom write about Windows OS and applications problems, and solutions. The Gripe Line generates columns on computer manufacturers that do not deliver the goods like a reasonable person would expect. (Their latest column is on how a lot of software manufacturers renege on their rebate promises.) IS Survival Guide is a more of a column of how to exist in a corporation when you are a geek, and all high level managers inherently hate geeks. Geekus envy, probably. And finally, there is Notes from the Field, their computer gossip columnist. I keep meaning to check to see if this guy's predictions ever come true, but it really doesn't matter, it is fun to read.
PC Week, as I indicated, does not have as interesting a set of columnist. I will admit that their gossip column, Spencer F Katt, is better than InfoWorld's, but in most other respects they do not measure up as well.
They all have web sites too, where back issues are stored in a searchable format. Unfortunately, Inforworld requires you to register for their site, and you have to have a valid subscription to their magazine (www.infoworld.com) whereas PC Week (as you would expect, www.pcweek.com), which is part of the large Ziff Davis organization, lets all comers get on their site. Both sites do have full text of their columnists, and I would invite you to give them a peek. Especially the two gossip columns.