"Unfortunately, the model as a whole couldn’t compete with the internet."<p>I never think they were meant to. As young nerd, without a connection to The Internet, at a time where one would have you spend literally days online to download the amount of data a CD holds, these magazines were absolutely fantastic!<p>Every month, when they came out, I was off to the store to get my two or three magazines, for about half the price of a computer game, I'd get three CDs full of weird, strange, wonderful stuff to peruse. In a way, those CDs were even more like the Internet that was slowly developing, than the Internet today.<p>Not only were the articles in the magazines interesting and inspirational to young me, but there was simply no other way I could get access to all that wonderful random stuff that were on the CDs.
Here in Brazil those still exist, reason is that tax on literature is zero, but tax on software or games is ridiculously high, but if you put your software on a magazine, it counts as literature and get zero tax...
This publication wasn’t mentioned in the article, but I remember my first exposure to Linux was a bootable LinuxPPC image that came with the CD-ROM attached to MacAddict magazine. Must have been a KDE 1.2 desktop. Seems like the concept stuck around longer for computer enthusiast publications.
I'm reminded of the awesome youtube channel Pixelmusement with the "Shovelware Diggers" series that's been going on for a few years. Basically they're exploring the contents of a 2 disk CD Shareware set and more or less trying to run/play/review the 2000 programs on the disks.<p>It's a fantastic snapshot in time of the pre-internet CD-ROM era.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Pixelmusement" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/Pixelmusement</a>
I remember both Launch and Blender and might still even have a disc or two. They were definitely a step above magazine cover discs in terms of content. Unfortunately for me neither was really up my alley. They were more for the readers of Spin which I was not.<p>I always thought Wired would make for a good CD-ROM magazine. Both the content and graphic design seemed to match the medium pretty well.
For years I was subscribed to one or the other pc magazine that came with a CD (or later, a DVD). We didn’t have broadband so the only way to get trail ware or games was via magazines.<p>Even younger me didn’t buy magazines but I just bought floppy’s. Yeah. 1.44mib could well fit one or even two (!) game demo’s.
As I worked on the device-drivers and devices that could play them (like the Tandy/Memorex VIS lol) I still have a bunch of unopened Medio CD-ROMS. One of these days I'll have to hook up the old chan3 coax to the TV and fire it all up...
Before broadband, it was worth paying a little more just to get the PC Gamer with the CD full of demos. I'd play all the demos on the CD and it was time for next month's issue. My inner 12 year old was a fan of the coconut monkey gags too...