I hope everyone will pardon a rather silly but interesting trip down an odd memory lane. I love going back and looking at old magazines to get a feel for the various things that used to be popular and are now forgotten, predictions of the future, old products that are no longer with use, and so forth.
In 1978 Kathy Keeton, magazine publisher and wife of Penthouse creator Bob Guccione, decided to start her own popular science magazine.
Now the result of this, called Omni, ran from 1978 to 1996, spent another year as an early online magazine after the print version folded, then folded completely in 1997 upon Keeton's death. A short lived (10 episode) TV series called Omni: The Frontier aired in 1981, along with some comics and a couple of trade paperbacks containing collections of sci-fi short fiction from the magazine also were released. An attempt at a reboot has been and off for a while, at some point Penthouse holdings got the rights back and announced new issues would be returning but the promised date passed with no word I have no idea where the project is now. There's a website sitting on the name that right now just seem to be a sci-fi/science oriented clickbait site.
Anyway back to the original 1978-1996 run. It was an... odd duck. Imagine a fairly bog standard Popular Science ripoff, sprinkle in about 20-30% more paranormal and mystical woo, some surprisingly good interviews, some high quality original short fiction from leading sci-fi authors of the time, and wrap it up in some truly amazing cover art and just a general more weird and avante guard package that's pretty much what you got. And surprisingly while it was certainly weirder than most popular science magazines of the time it didn't have any added sleaze as you would expect from its publisher.
At some point in my late childhood / early teens I don't rmemeber exactly when I a box containing a couple of dozen issue from a relative who passed them on to me (them certainly not knowing the publishing company they were from, not that it really mattered. I later heard a few conversations in passing that leads me to believe they were originally from an uncle of mine who had had gotten them with a Penthouse subscription but didn't like them.)
Anywho at some point of course I tossed the magazines an mostly forgot about them until a few months back when, for whatever reason, Amazon published the entire run of magazine digitally for Prime Members.
So I decided to pick a few older magazines at random and browse them on my Kindle table.
October 1978 (First Issue)
- An interview with Freeman Dyson.
- An ad for L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. These were all over Omni in the early years. I don't know if younger folks get how much of a push Scientology made to be a legit religion back in the late 70s and 80s, really presenting itself in a pretty slick ad campaign as a mixture of a new age religion and a self improvement philosophy. It's still weird to see it in that context.
- A gloriously cheesy ad for Jovan Sex Appeal Aftershave with Boris Velijo art.
- Several ads for various book and records clubs. Another thing that I bet a lot of people under the age of... 25 or so don't quite get the utter ubiquity of at one time. Essentially you purchased an initial amount of the product (3 books for 99 cents each, 5 CDs for a dollar, whatever) but they would then automatically send you more that you would have to send back or get charged for at regular or even inflated prices. At some point these died off and I vaguely recall the government getting involved and squashing some of their more predatory practices.
- Cigarette ads. Damn these are weird to see now.
- An ad for the Polariod Sonar OneStep, an instant camera that uses "sonar" to automatically focus the lens. This was a thing?
- An article about the Shroud of Turin. *Laughs*
- A short stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov
- A really good article on the Split-brain.
- An article about the "upcoming" 26 February 1979 total eclipse. The funny thing there's actually a line in the article that says "After next year most Americans will be forced to do their eclipse viewing in foreign lands or wait until August 21, 2017."
- An add for something called "Simulation Games from SPI." The weird thing is I read the ad from top to bottom and I have zero idea what they are selling. It's too early to be computer games so I'm assuming they are rule books for some kind of pen and paper D&D style game, but they aren't exactly clear on what exactly they are.
- An ad selling information that proves "UFO's May Doom Life on Earth! Read the Official U.S. Government Findings." The 437 page report was available for only 6.98 cents (money order only) from a P.O box in Brooklyn. Yeah I'll get right on that.
- Another ad for Scientology although I went back and noticed something. The first ad was for the "L. Ron Hubbard Foundation" and this one is for Dianetics and neither ad mentions the other. Weird it's like they had two brands going for some reason.
May 1979.
- An ad for the Casio Melody Calculator. A pocket calculator that could play the eleven note musical scale from A to D for some reason because I guess this is a thing that people needed in 1979.
- An article about the possibility of putting a giant turbine (with blades as "long as a football field) underwater in the Gulf Stream to generate "enough energy to power the entire Eastern United States." I don't think we have one of those.
- An interview with Richard Feynman.
- Another ad for Dianetics, but this one name drops Hubbard. So I have no idea what's going on at this point.
- An ad for "The Incredible Beamscope Zoom Lens." It's a 60 dollar lens that hands in front of your TV to make it bigger. I'm not making this up. "Turns a 13 inch TV into a 96 inch TV!" And I'm sur it looks amazing.
- Two separate adds from automatic phone dailers. Didn't know these were a big mainstream product.
January 1987.
- Article "Fourteen Futurist Describe 2007." Oh you know this is going to be good. A sampling.
Bill Gates: His is actually pretty sane with only a few forays into over-predictions. He correctly pretty much nails the internet as a concept, saying we'll be able to be able to view most any information from home as easily as being there. I did chuckle a bit when he expressed concern that future simulations of things like concerts and sporting events and tourist spots might be so good there's no point in living home.
Tony Vera: (Audiovisual innovator, inventor of Instant Replay): "I can tell you step by step what's going to happen. We'll have high definition TV with a wide screen of, say 1125 lines rather than 525." Okay not too far off. A lot of his other predictions didn't happen though.
Timothy Leary: "By 2007 the problem of scarcity will have been solved." *Snort*
"Within 20 years we'll have scrapped the current political system of partisan politics." I haven't been paying attention is that what happened?
Andrew Greenley: "The so-called conflict between science and religion will have vanished 20 years from now." Yeah that didn't happen.
- A short story from Ursela K. Le Guin.
- An article "Robotic Warriors Clash in Cyberwars!" - an article that seems to think we'll jump straight from 1980s level of military tech to full on Skynet Judgement Day killer robots controlled by supercomputer with no stage inbetween. For some reason futurist had a real hard time with the idea of a transitional stage where computers and robots were tools in warfare but not running the show.
- An ad for for 799 dollar "budget" PC. Complete 4.77 mhz processor, 640k of RAM, two floppy drives, and a monochrome monitor. A 20 meg hard drive was an available add-on for 450 bucks. God I love old computer ads.
- An ad for "Earth Scents" branded incense. Was there really a period where incense was big enough to have major brand name?
- An ad for Casio digital calculator wristwatches. Damn those were cool.
May 1990.
- An ad for a "portable" Smith Corona Word Processor which looks to be the size of a small laser printer.
- An ad for CompuServe. I have a soft spot for the pre-World Wide Web internet.
- "The Killing Fields: Latter Day Plagues." An article about AIDs. Okay given how much stigma was attached to AIDs/HIV in the early days and much rampant homophobia and to a much lesser degree Puritan attitudes about sex informed it all I don't want to harp on this too much but it is odd looking back at how alarmist the disease's potential was seen at the time, how the popular theory of the time was that a sexually transmitted disease was going to be able to reach plague levels when, and again not to make light of the disease, sexually transmitted diseases on a basic mechanical level can't spread that fast. But "By 2000 AIDs will have killed a 1/4 of the world's population" and/or that it was basically going to be the end of sex as we knew it were ideas you could express and be taken seriously.
- An article about robotic insects, which apparently by 2029 (a weirdly long point in the future for a futurist magazine but whatever) will be cleaning our teeth, vacuuming our carpet, and my favorite "Robohornets" will defend our homes with onboard DNA sampling machines and "Steel quarter inch stingers" to deter intruders. I'm going to start saving up now so I have enough to buy a set of these in 2029.
- An ad for a "Subliminal Brain Programming Cassettes." Another weird New Age bit of nonsense that was all over the place back in the day. For only 3.99 per cassette you can lose weight, quit smoking, or look years younger. There's another 3 ads in this issue alone selling essentially the same idea.
- An ad "YOU CAN MAKE UP TO $9,800 IN 24 HOURS!" And then an entire page of small text that doesn't actually tell you how, and I don't mean how I mean in the loosest sense of what broad industry or service you'd be in. I'm assuming pyramid scheme.
January 1993.
- A US Robotics Ad. 40% off the world's fastest fax modem! 14,440 bps!
- An ad for Power Translator software. Available on Spanish, French, and German. Only 275 buck each.
- An article that complains that antisemitism is hurting the UFOology field. Yes really.
- Sooooooo many ads for Cable TV Converters. So many.
- In a rare case of cross-brand promotion an ad for the "New Penthouse Online." Read Penthouse Letters and look at pictures (Remember this is a pre-web 1993 with 9,600 baud modems and VGA screens so that must have been soooo hot) for only 5.95 a month.
- An ad for the Sharp pocket touchscreen word processor. I love how everyone at the time thought that people would actually be typing out full documents on a Chiclet keyboard.
- An article the upcoming first generation of CD Base game consoles. "Right now the hardware with the best chance of survival is the SegaCD. Waiting in the wings is Nintendo. Although Nintendo won't release a compact-disc player peripheral for its Super Nintendo machine until well into 1993, don't count it out, because Nintendo has allied itself with Sony."
*Laughs for several hours.* Okay if you don't know why this is so funny in hindsight. Nintendo pulled the plug on their the shared CD-ROM ad with Sony almost literally at the 11th hour, leaving Sony to swallow the entire R&D budget. Well Sony decided screw that and took what they had learned making a CD-ROM add-on for Nintendo and redesigned it into a stand alone CD-ROM based system... the Playstation. Sega's CD-ROM drive was a flop, confusing customers (by the end of the cycle there 3 completely different gaming architectures requiring a base machine and one or two add-ons for the Sega Genesis) which caused it to lose ground with it's next system and never fully recover before dropping out of the hardware market entirely.
- An ad for a floppy disk containing the "Guide to America's Best Restaurants," a listing of 3,000 restaurants and their ratings. There's also ads in the magazine for every major city phonebook on CD. It's weird to see attempts at high level information distribution in the the days before internet ubiquity.
In 1978 Kathy Keeton, magazine publisher and wife of Penthouse creator Bob Guccione, decided to start her own popular science magazine.
Now the result of this, called Omni, ran from 1978 to 1996, spent another year as an early online magazine after the print version folded, then folded completely in 1997 upon Keeton's death. A short lived (10 episode) TV series called Omni: The Frontier aired in 1981, along with some comics and a couple of trade paperbacks containing collections of sci-fi short fiction from the magazine also were released. An attempt at a reboot has been and off for a while, at some point Penthouse holdings got the rights back and announced new issues would be returning but the promised date passed with no word I have no idea where the project is now. There's a website sitting on the name that right now just seem to be a sci-fi/science oriented clickbait site.
Anyway back to the original 1978-1996 run. It was an... odd duck. Imagine a fairly bog standard Popular Science ripoff, sprinkle in about 20-30% more paranormal and mystical woo, some surprisingly good interviews, some high quality original short fiction from leading sci-fi authors of the time, and wrap it up in some truly amazing cover art and just a general more weird and avante guard package that's pretty much what you got. And surprisingly while it was certainly weirder than most popular science magazines of the time it didn't have any added sleaze as you would expect from its publisher.
At some point in my late childhood / early teens I don't rmemeber exactly when I a box containing a couple of dozen issue from a relative who passed them on to me (them certainly not knowing the publishing company they were from, not that it really mattered. I later heard a few conversations in passing that leads me to believe they were originally from an uncle of mine who had had gotten them with a Penthouse subscription but didn't like them.)
Anywho at some point of course I tossed the magazines an mostly forgot about them until a few months back when, for whatever reason, Amazon published the entire run of magazine digitally for Prime Members.
So I decided to pick a few older magazines at random and browse them on my Kindle table.
October 1978 (First Issue)
- An interview with Freeman Dyson.
- An ad for L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. These were all over Omni in the early years. I don't know if younger folks get how much of a push Scientology made to be a legit religion back in the late 70s and 80s, really presenting itself in a pretty slick ad campaign as a mixture of a new age religion and a self improvement philosophy. It's still weird to see it in that context.
- A gloriously cheesy ad for Jovan Sex Appeal Aftershave with Boris Velijo art.
- Several ads for various book and records clubs. Another thing that I bet a lot of people under the age of... 25 or so don't quite get the utter ubiquity of at one time. Essentially you purchased an initial amount of the product (3 books for 99 cents each, 5 CDs for a dollar, whatever) but they would then automatically send you more that you would have to send back or get charged for at regular or even inflated prices. At some point these died off and I vaguely recall the government getting involved and squashing some of their more predatory practices.
- Cigarette ads. Damn these are weird to see now.
- An ad for the Polariod Sonar OneStep, an instant camera that uses "sonar" to automatically focus the lens. This was a thing?
- An article about the Shroud of Turin. *Laughs*
- A short stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov
- A really good article on the Split-brain.
- An article about the "upcoming" 26 February 1979 total eclipse. The funny thing there's actually a line in the article that says "After next year most Americans will be forced to do their eclipse viewing in foreign lands or wait until August 21, 2017."
- An add for something called "Simulation Games from SPI." The weird thing is I read the ad from top to bottom and I have zero idea what they are selling. It's too early to be computer games so I'm assuming they are rule books for some kind of pen and paper D&D style game, but they aren't exactly clear on what exactly they are.
- An ad selling information that proves "UFO's May Doom Life on Earth! Read the Official U.S. Government Findings." The 437 page report was available for only 6.98 cents (money order only) from a P.O box in Brooklyn. Yeah I'll get right on that.
- Another ad for Scientology although I went back and noticed something. The first ad was for the "L. Ron Hubbard Foundation" and this one is for Dianetics and neither ad mentions the other. Weird it's like they had two brands going for some reason.
May 1979.
- An ad for the Casio Melody Calculator. A pocket calculator that could play the eleven note musical scale from A to D for some reason because I guess this is a thing that people needed in 1979.
- An article about the possibility of putting a giant turbine (with blades as "long as a football field) underwater in the Gulf Stream to generate "enough energy to power the entire Eastern United States." I don't think we have one of those.
- An interview with Richard Feynman.
- Another ad for Dianetics, but this one name drops Hubbard. So I have no idea what's going on at this point.
- An ad for "The Incredible Beamscope Zoom Lens." It's a 60 dollar lens that hands in front of your TV to make it bigger. I'm not making this up. "Turns a 13 inch TV into a 96 inch TV!" And I'm sur it looks amazing.
- Two separate adds from automatic phone dailers. Didn't know these were a big mainstream product.
January 1987.
- Article "Fourteen Futurist Describe 2007." Oh you know this is going to be good. A sampling.
Bill Gates: His is actually pretty sane with only a few forays into over-predictions. He correctly pretty much nails the internet as a concept, saying we'll be able to be able to view most any information from home as easily as being there. I did chuckle a bit when he expressed concern that future simulations of things like concerts and sporting events and tourist spots might be so good there's no point in living home.
Tony Vera: (Audiovisual innovator, inventor of Instant Replay): "I can tell you step by step what's going to happen. We'll have high definition TV with a wide screen of, say 1125 lines rather than 525." Okay not too far off. A lot of his other predictions didn't happen though.
Timothy Leary: "By 2007 the problem of scarcity will have been solved." *Snort*
"Within 20 years we'll have scrapped the current political system of partisan politics." I haven't been paying attention is that what happened?
Andrew Greenley: "The so-called conflict between science and religion will have vanished 20 years from now." Yeah that didn't happen.
- A short story from Ursela K. Le Guin.
- An article "Robotic Warriors Clash in Cyberwars!" - an article that seems to think we'll jump straight from 1980s level of military tech to full on Skynet Judgement Day killer robots controlled by supercomputer with no stage inbetween. For some reason futurist had a real hard time with the idea of a transitional stage where computers and robots were tools in warfare but not running the show.
- An ad for for 799 dollar "budget" PC. Complete 4.77 mhz processor, 640k of RAM, two floppy drives, and a monochrome monitor. A 20 meg hard drive was an available add-on for 450 bucks. God I love old computer ads.
- An ad for "Earth Scents" branded incense. Was there really a period where incense was big enough to have major brand name?
- An ad for Casio digital calculator wristwatches. Damn those were cool.
May 1990.
- An ad for a "portable" Smith Corona Word Processor which looks to be the size of a small laser printer.
- An ad for CompuServe. I have a soft spot for the pre-World Wide Web internet.
- "The Killing Fields: Latter Day Plagues." An article about AIDs. Okay given how much stigma was attached to AIDs/HIV in the early days and much rampant homophobia and to a much lesser degree Puritan attitudes about sex informed it all I don't want to harp on this too much but it is odd looking back at how alarmist the disease's potential was seen at the time, how the popular theory of the time was that a sexually transmitted disease was going to be able to reach plague levels when, and again not to make light of the disease, sexually transmitted diseases on a basic mechanical level can't spread that fast. But "By 2000 AIDs will have killed a 1/4 of the world's population" and/or that it was basically going to be the end of sex as we knew it were ideas you could express and be taken seriously.
- An article about robotic insects, which apparently by 2029 (a weirdly long point in the future for a futurist magazine but whatever) will be cleaning our teeth, vacuuming our carpet, and my favorite "Robohornets" will defend our homes with onboard DNA sampling machines and "Steel quarter inch stingers" to deter intruders. I'm going to start saving up now so I have enough to buy a set of these in 2029.
- An ad for a "Subliminal Brain Programming Cassettes." Another weird New Age bit of nonsense that was all over the place back in the day. For only 3.99 per cassette you can lose weight, quit smoking, or look years younger. There's another 3 ads in this issue alone selling essentially the same idea.
- An ad "YOU CAN MAKE UP TO $9,800 IN 24 HOURS!" And then an entire page of small text that doesn't actually tell you how, and I don't mean how I mean in the loosest sense of what broad industry or service you'd be in. I'm assuming pyramid scheme.
January 1993.
- A US Robotics Ad. 40% off the world's fastest fax modem! 14,440 bps!
- An ad for Power Translator software. Available on Spanish, French, and German. Only 275 buck each.
- An article that complains that antisemitism is hurting the UFOology field. Yes really.
- Sooooooo many ads for Cable TV Converters. So many.
- In a rare case of cross-brand promotion an ad for the "New Penthouse Online." Read Penthouse Letters and look at pictures (Remember this is a pre-web 1993 with 9,600 baud modems and VGA screens so that must have been soooo hot) for only 5.95 a month.
- An ad for the Sharp pocket touchscreen word processor. I love how everyone at the time thought that people would actually be typing out full documents on a Chiclet keyboard.
- An article the upcoming first generation of CD Base game consoles. "Right now the hardware with the best chance of survival is the SegaCD. Waiting in the wings is Nintendo. Although Nintendo won't release a compact-disc player peripheral for its Super Nintendo machine until well into 1993, don't count it out, because Nintendo has allied itself with Sony."
*Laughs for several hours.* Okay if you don't know why this is so funny in hindsight. Nintendo pulled the plug on their the shared CD-ROM ad with Sony almost literally at the 11th hour, leaving Sony to swallow the entire R&D budget. Well Sony decided screw that and took what they had learned making a CD-ROM add-on for Nintendo and redesigned it into a stand alone CD-ROM based system... the Playstation. Sega's CD-ROM drive was a flop, confusing customers (by the end of the cycle there 3 completely different gaming architectures requiring a base machine and one or two add-ons for the Sega Genesis) which caused it to lose ground with it's next system and never fully recover before dropping out of the hardware market entirely.
- An ad for a floppy disk containing the "Guide to America's Best Restaurants," a listing of 3,000 restaurants and their ratings. There's also ads in the magazine for every major city phonebook on CD. It's weird to see attempts at high level information distribution in the the days before internet ubiquity.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2iwr0an
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire