I still miss MacWEEK, which I barely managed to qualify for, by publishing a magazine which had four or five Macs in-office and was designed with PageMaker and then Quark Express. In retrospect, so much of that era now feels like Mom 'n Pop corner groceries versus the tech giants of today.
I remember sneaking into the mailroom at U Mich every week to snatch the MacWEEK from the IT guyâs box, read it, and put it back before he knew it was missing. I was a PC DOS guy before I went to UM, where my department had moved over to Mac. I got a MacPlus and have never gone back.
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The secret of MacWEEK (and Infoworld and PC Week) was that they didnât check anything, so you could just make up numbers and get a free subscription. They were happy to do this because they could then tell advertisers how many âvolume buyersâ were in their audience. It was all a bit of a flim-flam, I suspect, though Iâm sure the advertisers took that into account too.
When I was a student at Cornell, I was in charge of a number of the public computer rooms, so I used those numbers when I applied to get MacWEEK. 
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I used to manage ALL the PCs and Macs in public-access computer labs at the University of Virginia in the early 90s, a number (for both platforms) around 750. To get this subscription and others, in filling out the form I wildly inflated the numbers of machines we had on Grounds (by a factor of ten, as I recall).
Working late one night, I had a call from MacWeek staff asking me to confirm the numbers I had submitted. Yeah, sure, whatever.
Next thing I know UVA had the third-largest installation of Macs in the US, as reported in a subsequent issue.
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I really wanted the magazine, but try as I might, I could never get a subscription.
I was able to get a subscriptionâbut no longer remember how I managed to do so. (I also had a subscription to the DEC magazine.)
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It wasnât just computer magazines; all sorts of trade magazines gave out free subscriptions for people who claimed to buy things, and there was very little serious auditing of the claims. I worked for a couple of laser industry magazine for many years, and what we called âcontrolled circulationâ was for many years a formula for making money from advertising by giving the printed magazines away for free. Over the years I explained to many engineers and scientists how the system worked. A few didnât want to lie. I remember a colonel working on Star Wars who refused to lie about because he didnât really buy anything; he was a good news source, so I comped him with a free subscription.
A few of the early PC magazines got huge in the early to mid 1980s. I think PC got up to more than 900 pages when it was monthly. They were desperate for articles because they had to have at least a third editorial content to magazine rates from the Post Office, so a 900-page issue meant 600 pages of advertising and 300 pages of articles that paid quite well.
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Long-time MacWeek editor Ric Ford now runs the excellent Mac news site MacInTouch:
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When I started college, I brought a typewriter with me, and I had no interest at all in computers. One of my freshman year roommates showed up with a brand new 128k Mac. Three days later, I was publishing the dorm newsletter with MacWrite and MacPaint. Before graduating, I had a small technical consulting business and my very own MacWEEK subscription. I still remember the excitement I felt each time I saw a copy in my mailbox. How I miss those days!
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I was a programmer/systems analyst at a major bank with a few thousand IT employees in various locations. I obtained subscriptions to Computerworld, Network News, MacWeek, and other publications by âtruthfullyâ answering their questionnaires. When asked how many IT employees my company had, I could usually check the highest level. When asked about my role in obtaining new products, I would answer that I advised, which was true as I was very occasionally asked for my opinion.
As far as I recall, I didnât immediately get a MacWeek subscription, but I did get one after a few attempts.
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Somewhere I may still have a stash of those. We got MacWeek when my employers upgraded my one-person art department from an IBM Electronic Selectric Composer/wax applicator or rubber cement for pasteup/Rapidographs/transfer type and film âworkflowâ to a Mac Plus, Pagemaker 1.5, and Linotronic100 RIP and processing units for the Linotronicâs output. I believe the MacWeek subscription came with the Linotype gear.
Later I subscribed to MacUser and MacWorld.
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I assume you mean when the Mac setup came, the Linotype gear went. The Linotype machine was a revolution in typesetting when it was invented in the 1880s. History of the Linotype Before then typesetting required putting each letter in place by hand. The Linotype was a large machine cast blocks of type from molten lead. When I was at Caltech, our student newspaper was set with a Linotype machine, and it was a fascinating contraption to watch. The production manager of the trade magazine I worked at in the 1970s used rubber cement for pasteup. Computerized typesetting was a revolution, and the Mac was in the forefront.
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Thanks to this thread I just had a blast paging through some old MacWeek issues at the Internet Archives. Some very quaint stories, like one auguring the rise of networked calendaring (âGet used to it: your schedule isnât personal anymoreâ!), and some hilarious ads (âMake your own CDâsâfor only $3,995â). Recommended way to spend a wistful few minutes.
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No, I meant exactly what I wrote.
With the 100th anniversary of Linotype, the leading producer of the traditional hot-type machine, fast approaching as 1986 nears, it seemed apropos to find that this company, now a division of Allied, had one of the best image setters, albeit at $29,950 also one of the most expensive. The Linotronic 100 operates in conjunction with a Macintosh to produce camera-ready copy of mixed type and graphics on a special resin-coated paper. The quality is remarkable.
We got the Linotronic 100 and Mac Plus in March 1986. Pagemaker ran off a floppy. We fairly quickly replaced the Plus (no HD) with a Mac SE with an internal HD, a whopping 20MB, if I remember correcly.
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Aha! I was confused along with @jeff1, because I had always exclusively associated the word âLinotypeâ with the hot metal machine. I forgot it was also the name of the company, so now I understand that you were referring to the Linotronic 100 when you said âwhen the Linotype gear arrived.â Thanks for the clarification.
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If you lived in a busy city, Iâll bet you remember many, many âHonor Boxesâ of free magazines located just about all busy areas, including a few subway and bus stations:
Free Mac focused Magazines were distributed in Honor Boxes here in business areas of New York City. They would be replenished very often, and Macs did get a significant amount of coverage in the free computer and business magazines. And I do remember quite a few Mac focused magazines.
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The Mac/Linotronic was a HUGE leap from the IBM Electronic Selectric Composer. The composer was similar to a Selectric typewriter, except that it could do variable spacing and so forth, and produced justified text. It could store a page and a half of text. The typefaces were on those little IBM balls, so sizes ranged from small to smaller. When you switched to a different size, you had to remember to manually change a lever on one side for letter spacing as well as one on the other side for leading. Anything larger than 14 pt had to be done with Prestype (transfer lettering). Everything that was finalized had to be pasted up.
Eventually we phased out the Linotype equipment, to the relief of everyone who was sick of the fumes of the photo chemicals. We moved to a Xanté Accel-a-Writer.
In 1993, a co-development agreement was signed with Adobeâą Systems that gave Xante source code rights to Adobe PostScript Level 2 software. Being a member of the Adobe co-development program enabled Xante to couple its proprietary technology with the industry standard printer language, Adobe PostScript. In 1994, Xante shipped the Accel-a-Writer 8200, the first in a series of high-performance, high-resolution printers that won the 1994 MacUser Editorâs Choice Award for Best New Monochrome Printer.
Not long after that, we were able to send files rather than hard copy to the company that printed our materials. We used gigantic 100MB Zip disks and a messenger. The next leap forward was sending the files via a Supra 14,4 modem.
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Funny. I donât remember what I told them, but never had trouble getting a subscription, and I only had 2 Macs at the time
MacWorld, MacUser, MacAddict (a favorite that died too early)
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Re: MacAddict, I loved the music they sent on their CD each month. I âhijackedâ a lot of it for my library.
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