MacAddict was not the first, was not even my first, Mac magazine (that goes to MacWorld, I believe, and Mac Home Journal, respectively). But no doubt it was my favorite, picking my family up as a faithful subscriber when I was a teenager until I went away to college years later. It’s humor, coverage, design, attitude, and topics were so much more my level than the MacWorld my Dad used to get. And that’s why I started my deatomization project- to bring the Internet an almost forgotten piece of history, MacAddict.

MacAddict was amazing for two reasons- the magazine and the CD. Others have come before me and archived the CDs from every issue (a project I started to do, before finding out it was already complete!) available here at The Internet Archive.

The magazine on the other hand, well, let’s take a look at the first year – 1996. I didn’t start reading MacAddict until issue 16, so these first two years are done without the full benefit of nostalgia goggles. But look at this cover…

Before the return of Steve Jobs, the iMac, the G3/G4/G5, and of course the Intel/iPod/iPhone times, being an Apple fan was hard. Everyone hated the Mac, for a variety of odd reasons. MacAddict was like pirate radio, for the underground, giving hope to the Apple faithful. I hope you see that in the pages of the initial year. Because there’s a lot (a lot!) of failed ideas- the Pippin, Gil Amelio, OpenDoc, Copland, Cyberdog, eWorld, Mac clones, ooph! But there’s some gems, some still with us companies (my favorite – Other World Computing, advertising right off the bat, watch over the years as they go from a tiny also-ran to 2-4 page spreads in the ad section), and some real classic Mac fun.

Each issue has been meticulously scanned, OCR’d, deskewed, and losslessly compressed. Given that the age of the magazines are 10-15+ years old, please forgive any blotches, rips, or pencil marks.

If you see any missing pages, content, unbearable marks, etc. let me know. If the OCR gave up the ghost on a section, I’ll try to fix it. As the issues go by, the process got better and better, so please bear with the results!

There will be some occasional funny bits – like when the automatic deskewing actually was there in the real issue! Let’s just hope it’s rare, though if it isn’t I may make a second version.

Before:

After:

So let’s get to it! Here’s the 1996 MacAddict collection, issues 1-4, September to December 1996. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

MacAddict-001-199609-BobKiwi-v1.pdf 110.5 MB
MacAddict-002-199610-BobKiwi-v1.pdf 119.0 MB
MacAddict-003-199611-BobKiwi-v1.pdf 125.8 MB
MacAddict-004-199612-BobKiwi-v1.pdf 133.2 MB