I became the CD Editor of Windows Magazine in January 1995. With my associate editor Tom LaSusa, we edited, assembled and produced the quarterly WINDOWS Magazine CD until November 1996.

Check out the cover of the first issue in early 1995: $9.95 ($20 in 2025 money). Ninety shareware programs. 1250 Tips and Tricks (mostly from Dave Methvin and Martin Heller, both of whom you can find on LinkedIn if you’re interested). Not video demos of the tricks and tips, but “animated” demonstrations which mixed a slide show and a voice track. I have no recollection how we did it.

Full text of all 1994 issues of the magazine. To make that useful, I realized we needed a search engine. I paid a freelancer to write one. During the last demo of the CD-Rom, for company president Michael Leeds, he used his own name as a search term. The engine blew up. The programmer rewrote it for free. I have never used or written a program since that I didn’t test with the null set. Never forget the null set. Michael delayed the release for two weeks; the next demo went better.

I’m not going to say things were primitive in 1995, but the CD-ROM was all written in HTML, much of it by hand, much of it by me after my two-day HTML class. Browsers were so rare we had to include a copy of Netscape on every CD so people could read it.

Tips and Tricks were a thing back then.