HardCopy Retrospective

Sean Wilson and Matt Nicholson look back over 50 issues of HardCopy magazine.

HardCopy Issue: 50 | Published: 01/11/2010 | Last Revision: 16/05/2011

The magazine HardCopy was born in the final months of the previous century, although the title was written as {hardcopy} to reflect Grey Matter’s roots in the world of hard-core programming. Now, 50 issues and over a decade later, we take a brief look at how both the industry and the magazine have changed. To the Software Catalogue that had gone before, and under the guiding hand of editor Sean Wilson, the first issue added a short news section, a section of ‘featured products’, a couple of pages of technical information, and a selection of posts from the Grey Matter TechTalk discussion forums. A hot topic at the time was Visual Basic 6.0, together with supporting ActiveX controls such as True DBGrid Pro 6.0 from Apex, Spread 3.0 from Farpoint and Sheridan’s Data Widgets 3.1.

Reader response

We asked you which software has had the biggest impact on your lives since 1998, and the response was varied. Perhaps the most obvious was Visual Studio, and in particular the 2005 edition. Also mentioned was Delphi, together with Ruby on Rails. Final Cut Pro and TechSmith Camtasia Studio came in for mention as video editing tools, as did Dragon NaturallySpeaking for finally delivering on speech-to-text conversion. Microsoft Outlook was credited for having a major impact on day-to-day business. Less surprising was the nomination of Microsoft’s .NET Framework as being responsible for the most important change in software development over the period.

Another big theme was Web development. Most sites at the time were still static HTML, although tools for developing database driven sites were becoming available and XML was beginning to become part of our vocabulary. Products such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive and Allaire Homesite were at the forefront. Of these only Dreamweaver remains – Adobe bought those products it didn’t already own and by 2009 had discontinued development of GoLive and Homesite. In that first issue, TechTalk focused on the problems that customers were having installing VB6 and getting to grips with OCX and ActiveX controls. Microsoft had yet to release .NET, although even then it was clear that something important was on its way. Exactly what was not made clearer by Steve Ballmer’s 2000 description of the new technology as “a set, an environment, a programming infrastructure that supports the next generation of the Internet as a platform... a user environment, a set of fundamental user services that live on the client, in the server, in the cloud…” Many felt that Microsoft had lost its lead in the programming world, and that Java was the “programming infrastructure” that would support “the next generation of the Internet as a platform” through tools such as Borland’s JBuilder 3.0 and Symantec’s Visual Café 3.0. Even Microsoft had Visual J++ 6.0. It wasn’t until 2002 that we were able to finally lift the lid on .NET, and dedicate an issue to a detailed description of its core, its integration with Web services and its native programming languages. The first of many redesigns came in 2001, which also saw the introduction of TechWatch in which regular contributor Paul Warner looked at technologies that might become important in the near future. Subjects covered ranged from MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) to more down-to-earth innovations such as FireWire. In July 2003 Sean Wilson was covering quantum computing in Future History, while in February 2005 he was describing the cutting-edge technologies being deployed in the Grey Matter Experience Centre, such as DET (Desktop Extension Technology) and VIS (Virtual Infrastructure Solutions).

Angie's Diary ran for 15 issues.

By this time Grey Matter had expanded its remit to take in the needs of IT professionals as well as those directly involved in software development. This was reflected in our 2002 coverage of issues such as software licensing and rights management – areas that have only grown more complex with the passing years. It also saw our early promotion of the benefits of virtualisation – then seen as somewhat specialist but now a mainstream technology in the modern datacentre (and indeed the desktop).

Changing faces

October 2003 saw the biggest change with Matt Nicholson taking over as editor and bringing with him many of the faces and features that had been part of Developer Network Journal, the magazine he had published for Microsoft as part of the MSDN programme. Jon Honeyball started his regular rant And Another Thing by comparing the scripting capabilities of Microsoft Windows unfavourably with AppleScript, and fans of Angie Baxter were able at last to find out what had happened to her and her colleagues in the intervening months. This issue also saw us abandoning Sean Wilson on a desert island with nothing but a computer and eight software packages in the first of our Desert Island Software features. Sean’s choices were firmly those of the developer, with Visual Studio .NET up front together with tools for investigating XSLT and, presciently given today’s interest in dynamic programming, Perl. In the course of the following issues our castaways including Jason Vokes, who selected only two Borland products despite being the company’s European product manager (he also insisted on his Selmer Super Series 60 alto saxophone as luxury item); John ‘Debug’ Robbins who, having plumbed for MSDN Universal and a selection of debugging tools, chose a PRC-70 Tactical Radio as his luxury item (he had served as a Green Beret in the US Army); and John Watkins of IBM who became so enamoured with his company’s Software Development Platform that he threw the rest away and used his selected package to project-manage his escape. October 2004 saw us celebrating 21 years of Grey Matter with a major survey of the development platforms available. The big choice was between Microsoft .NET running on Windows and a Java virtual machine which could run on anything, but preferably on some flavour of Linux. Our coverage did recognise the existence of mobile platforms, although Apple iPhone and Google Android were still many years away. Our first 50 issues also saw quite a few versions of Microsoft Windows come and go. Microsoft launched Windows XP in 2002, much to the relief of those who had moved from Windows 98 to the subsequently disastrous Windows ME. Our March 2007 issue saw us asking of Windows Vista, “Does the ‘wow’ really start now?” The answer turned out to be in the negative with corporate users flocking to exercise their downgrade rights, and it’s only now with Windows 7 that Microsoft seems to have got it right. The September 2006 issue also saw the start of an occasional series of articles dedicated to multi-core processing. Intel had found it impossible to raise processor clock speeds above around 3.8GHz with current technologies, abandoning plans for a 4GHz processor in 2004 because of heat dissipation problems, and so had to find another way to increase processor power. The answer was found in multi-core processors, but this could only work if programmers started writing programs that took advantage of parallel processing streams. So began an education process that continues today, together with a range of tools that have evolved (and are still evolving) to take the pain out of parallel programming. Which brings us up to date, where we find growing interest in cloud computing, and in ways that we can reduce the environmental impact of the modern datacentre. So where will the next 50 issues take us? Check out our article Future-gazing to find out more…