Older nerds have the first few issues of Byte or Wired as their seminal computer magazines that moulded the way they view the world. For me, coming of age in the early 2000s as a suburban teenager that had to have his internet rationed, it was Atomic magazine.
Unlike Australian Personal Computer, which the local library had for free, Atomic I had to pay the newsagent for, which meant it sporadically entered my life and was more of a treat than a tome of reference like APC. Atomic was special in that it was written by a group of Aussies barely older than me and who were into the same stuff I was into - building fast computers, gaming and not much else.
Atomic hit newstands around the same time as blogs were starting to take off so its relevance didn’t last long, but for the first 50 issues or so, it gave legitimacy to a scene of computing that didn’t have it prior. It was a magazine for computer loving ratbags, by computer loving ratbags, not people new to computers or businesses. Towards the end, their forum was way more popular than the magazine, but I wouldn’t know, I was a loyal OCAUer and never really got into the Atomic forums, despite it being probably more of a legacy than their print output.
I don’t really scan much these days as it’s just too time consuming, but I couldn’t say no when someone got in touch offering an entire collection of Atomic that was gonna end up in the bin unless I scanned them. There’s a handful of issues missing (like the first one unfortunately!) but the bulk of them are now up on the Internet Archive for everyone to enjoy.
Hopefully they don’t get nuked by the copyright bots! I’ve enjoyed reminiscing with these 20+ year old magazines. I’ve found so much interesting stuff in there that it really deserves its own blog post.
By the way, if anyone has old issues of Australian Net Guide - I want to scan them! If there’s any other Aussie computer magazines I’ll probably have my arm twisted into picking those up and scanning them too…