The Age of Marvels

I clearly remember picking this magazine off the rack and paying three dollars for it. That felt expensive in 1981 or 1982, but I got my money’s worth. I read that issue of Electronic Games dozens of times.

I carried it everywhere: school, the car, the living room, the kitchen. During its first year, Electronic Games kept telling and retelling what was then the surprisingly short history of video games. I absorbed all of it. Before long, I could talk about “cyberentertainment” as if it were an established field rather than something we were all watching appear in real time.

Those were the days.

What I remember most clearly now is how scarce computer knowledge was. A couple of glossary pages in a game magazine could genuinely put a teenager ahead of the curve. A little information went a very long way when most schools had few computers and even fewer adults who knew much about them.

That scarcity is difficult to reconstruct from the present, when an answer is usually a search away. Part of the excitement of early personal computing was that every magazine, manual, program listing, and conversation felt like another piece of a map nobody around us had finished drawing.

Originally published June 20, 2012. Revised in 2026 to repair the presentation and preserve the piece as computing-history writing.