Friday Just for Fun: Magazines from print to floppy to cloud.

Remember your first magazine subscription? What was it? Highlights, Boys Life? Mine was Sports Illustrated of course. Today, I don’t have any traditional subscriptions…everything is online.

Well, before the internet, blogs, RSS feeds, tablets, the cloud…there was the idea to put a magazine on a floppy. Way back in 1987! One of my favorite blogs – Paleofuture on Smithsonian.com, describes the “floppyzine” as…

“In 1987, a small Dallas-based company launched a floppy disk magazine that was supposed to be a grand experiment in the future of the medium. At $19.95 an issue, The New Aladdin was a bi-monthly general-interest magazine that hoped to give readers an entirely new kind of interactive experience; complete with animated graphics, computer games, music, puzzles, and feature stories that allowed you to ask questions.”

I suggest you check it out: “The Magazine of the Future (on floppy disk!).” It’s a great look at the creative thinking that perhaps was a pre-cursor to what we have today. When you think about it, the web is basically what was envisioned for The New Aladdin…an interactive experience including animation, games, photos, videos, news, and we even get to ask questions and make comments. Heck, we even get to create our own magazines in the form blogs, content curation, etc.

The big differences…scale and price. What was once proposed on a single floppy disk is now on millions of hard drives and solid state drives scattered across the globe. And, what was once $20 per issue for one magazine, now is $20 or $40 a month for endless magazines, newpapers from around the world, streaming online radio, unlimited photo and video storage, (or whatever).

Cool.