McCracken's Top 13 Covers

Curated and described by veteran technology journalist and current editor for Fast Company, Harry McCracken.

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Creative Computing | "Friendly Computer Languages" | October 1982

In 1982, a few months out of high school, I sold reviews of a couple of TRS-80 microcomputer games to my favorite computer magazine, Creative Computing. It was the first time I ever got paid for writing. I still remember the thrill of seeing the issue on a newsstand. As this cover shows, it was still an era when multiple computing platforms duked it out, including Apple, TRS-80, TI, and Atari. Most would give way to the IBM PC and its clones within a few years.

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Computer Buying World | "Business Goes Direct" | June 1991

My first real job in computer publishing was as the reviews editor at Computer Buying World, a new magazine for people who bought computers from mail-order dealers (a means of purchase that still felt a bit daring back in those pre-internet days). Soon, direct buying became utterly mundane, which might help explain why a magazine devoted to the topic never took off. I still consider working at a magazine startup the best possible training for everything I've done since.

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PC World | "How to Connect to the Internet" | January 1995

At the end of 1994, after Computer Buying World folded, I got a job as an associate editor at PC World magazine, just in time to experience one of the newsiest periods in computing history. Suddenly, everyone wanted to get on the internet—which was a complicated process at the time. PCs didn't support dial-up connections out of the box, and web browsers were unfamiliar technology. Our how-to guide became one of our best-selling issues ever.

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PC World | "Windows 95" | August 1995

For years, PC World's bread and butter were high-speed computers, and we couldn't go wrong by putting one on the cover. Every incremental bump in processor speed—120 MHz!—was a big deal. Eventually, we got so much performance that most people stopped obsessing over clock speeds: Today, I use a five-year-old MacBook Pro and don't remember offhand what specific processor it packs.

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PC World | "Windows 95" | August 1995

Here's yet another 1995 PC World cover—the best-selling one of all time. The arrival of Windows 95 was the single greatest unifying topic the PC industry ever had. There was so much to say about it that we devoted two consecutive covers to the upgrade and its implications. Later versions of Windows, though popular, did not inspire the same frenzy of interest among readers.

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PC World | "Protect Yourself on the Web" | May 2001

For all its virtues, the internet introduced a bevy of hazards previously unknown to PC users, from spam to scams. Helping readers contend with them became one of PC World's principal responsibilities. This cover was one of several ambitious special issues we devoted to the subject—and the winner of a Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Award.

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PC World | "How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About PCs, Windows, and the Web" | October 2001

With its cartoony art and negative theme, this cover violated two long-standing theories about what made for a successful PC World cover story. It turned out that the angry guy trashing his computer resonated with readers, who made this issue a blockbuster. Inspired by its success, we did additional issues on similar themes, and there was even a line of Annoyances computer books with cover art by the same illustrator, Hal Mayforth.

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Digital World | "HDTV Face-Off" | October 2004

In 2004 the PC market was pretty mature, and an array of new gadgets—such as HDTVs and camera phones—were changing people's relationship with technology. PC World launched a sister publication, Digital World, to help readers pick the best products and get more out of them. It came and went rather quickly, as did numerous other magazines on the same subject that debuted around the same time. In retrospect, it was a pretty late date to launch a new technology magazine. Maybe Digital World should have been all-digital.

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PC World | "The Smartest Search Engines" | June 2007

By 2007, Google was already the 800-pound gorilla of online search, but there was still enough competition that we devoted a cover story to assessing readers' options. Competitors like Rollyo and Congoo didn't end up going much of anywhere. Google, on the other hand, just kept on growing.

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TIME | "Steve Jobs, 1955-2011" | October 17, 2011

I left PC World in 2008 to start my own tech website, Techologizer. I also began writing for TIME, which was one of my favorite magazines when I was growing up. After Apple's remarkable comeback in the early years of this century, the death of Steve Jobs was a transfixing moment—not just for the tech industry but for millions of people who used the company's products. The obituary of Apple's cofounder I'd written for TIME.com became part of a special issue the magazine assembled just a few hours after news of Jobs' death broke.

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TIME | "Can Google Solve Death?" | September 30, 2013

The increasingly far-flung ambitions of giant tech companies were reflected in this TIME cover story I wrote with Lev Grossman. It broke the news of Calico, a Google joint venture focused on extending human life—a goal far removed from the company's roots in online search yet emblematic of the "moonshots" it was increasingly pursuing. A couple of years later, Google CEO Larry Page created a new holding company, Alphabet, designed to spur the creation of more such moonshots—and Calico is still around, albeit with a decidedly low profile.

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Fast Company | "Microsoft Rewrites Its Code" | October 2017

Microsoft utterly dominated the tech business that PC World covered in the 1990s, and it was tough to see how its grip on the industry would ever weaken. Early in this century, however, the company struggled to remain relevant as the PC gave way to the internet and then the smartphone as engines of innovation. By 2017, a new CEO, Satya Nadella, had revived Microsoft's fortunes. I covered its striking turnaround for Fast Company.

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Fast Company | "Forget Your Phone" | November 2018

Once a bit of a backwater, tech is now a topic that intersects with the other big stories of our time. For this 2018 Fast Company feature, I interviewed Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry, who had become an investor and public face for Palm, a new startup that adopted a legendary Silicon Valley brand. The new Palm's product—a tiny smartphone designed not to be too addictive—reflected the deeply conflicted feelings many people had developed about the gadgets in our lives.

Interested in reading some of Harry McCracken’s other work? Check out his articles at Fast Company!

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