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In 1993 I had three opportunities to choose between. The first was to become a Deputy Editor at Future, publishers of PC Plus, and move to Bath from Kent, the second was to become Editor of Program Now in London, while the third was to become Cover Disk Editor for Personal Computer World magazine. I chose the latter because my wife was not fully ready to move across the country at that time and Program Now had only a limited readership and future in my view. Coincidentally, the owner of Program Now was also the founder of PCW Magazine, which I eventually chose to work for.
My job was similar to that at Future Publishing, even down to sourcing companies prepared to pay for their products to appear, and I wasn't asked to write 8-10 pages a month of editorial (as I did for the PC Plus Help Screen feature). This meant I could concentrate fully on the cover disks themselves. So I think these were some of my best. And, indeed, I certainly produced a lot of discs and editorial for VNU (PCW's publisher).
The CD-Roms started with the July 1994 issue when, for three months, the magazine was released in two versions, diskette and CD-Rom, to see what the sales were like. I knew they didn't need to do this - CD-Roms were a given to me - they should have gone straight for it in my opinion.
Anyway, once I had 650Mb of space to play with, well, that's when the party really started - and also when we were able to start releasing software for the Mac using dual format CD-Roms. Pretty soon I was adding videos and animations and all the good stuff that diskettes simply couldn't hold. The web wasn't really big then. CompuServe and other BBs were still the main communications leaders - but the CD-Roms were even better, because in the days of 2,400, 4,800 and 9,600 modems (or even 28.8s if you were rich), it would take days and weeks to download a CD-Rom worth of stuff. So the Cover CDs were really popular.
You know? That first CD-Rom burning system I bought to make master CD-Roms cost me £7,500 (about $15,000) and was only a single-speed writer. Adjusted for inflation, in today's money that's probably £10,000 or $20,000 - the price of a decent car! How times change...
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