Best of times, best of times

PC Live! offices back in the summer of 1995 the magazine was a very different beast and I was a very different person. After an abortive career in public relations I was, as a former employer admitted, gamekeeper turned poacher, or the other way around depending on your view of those whose job it is to get technology companies’ products featured in the pages of magazines such as PC Live!.

PC Live! was also about to embark on some exciting changes that I was lucky enough to be involved in. Back in those days we published, on average, a 48 page magazine every two months with a cover mounted floppy disk of free and shareware software.

 

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Farewell wee floppy

One of the first challenges I was faced with was the decision by my ever-ambitious publisher, Frank Quinn, to replace the cover-mounted floppy with a CD ROM. That may have meant we could compete with the imported UK titles who had already made the switch but it also meant that I had to try and find 650Mbyte of software to fill the damn thing. Thank God for the Internet is all I can say.

Of course there was also the small matter of needing to get a magazine out the door as well. Although I had a couple of years experience as a journalist – predominantly writing about music – my previous jobs as an editor had been on college papers. To steer me through that process I was lucky enough to have Miriam Casey, Scope’s long-serving production manager and a stalwart of the organisation whose long hours and dedication have ensured many a mammoth issue of PC Live! hit the newsstands on time. There were even a couple of 100-page plus bumper Christmas issues that we ended up working through the night to finish.

During my tenure we also moved to a monthly publishing schedule – first through the introduction of companion title PC Live! Top Tips and then with a full-blown issue every month. That move also saw current editor Stephen Cawley join the team as assistant editor and he ably moved into my shoes when I departed after five years in the editor’s seat.

Halycon days

I was lucky enough to be at the helm during a boom time for the industry as PC ownership and use of the Internet in Ireland was flourishing. It was always a standing joke around the office that I had the best job in the company – after all I could spend the afternoon playing computer games and legitimately claim I was working. My time as editor also coincided with the Internet explosion of the late nineties although a perennial frustration at that time was the lack of any home broadband products, despite Eircom’s efforts to pass off ISDN as a high speed product.

Networks…never

Leafing through back issues of PC Live! Recently, I was amused to see my predecessor Paul Healy apologising for mentioning a networking product in the magazine – something he had promised at the launch wouldn’t be covered in the magazine for home and small business users. How things have changed – now we think nothing of connecting to the Internet, the network of networks every day.

Over the years one of the most rewarding experiences was meeting our readers at the various shows we organised such as The Family Computer Show. In my day to day work I was sent information from technology companies, researched online and read a variety of other technology media to keep up with what was happening. But the most productive way to gather information and find out what we should be covering in the magazine was the valuable face to face feedback from readers. Of course that didn’t stop me from worrying that a reader was bound to catch me off-guard with a technical question – something I’m pleased to say never happened.

Best of times

All in all I have very fond memories of my time as editor of PC Live! – one of the main reasons why I have continued to contribute to it sporadically over the years. I also made good friends during that time, not least my fellow journalists including one time PC Live No. 2 Gordon Smith and Computerscope editor David D’Arcy – himself now a gamekeeper turned poacher.

Sure there were tensions from time to time, like when the sales people would look to squeeze in an extra ad on the last day of production, or worse still tell me I had to find another couple of pages of editorial at the last minute as an advertiser had dropped out.

Looking at PC Live! now, I sometimes struggle to recognise the magazine that I was proud to proclaim as Ireland’s best selling computer title. It has successfully moved with its readership to cover not just PCs but the full gamut of consumer electronics that are increasingly becoming part of all our lives. Here’s to another ten years.