In each trade, in each scene, there’s that one that is aware of everyone, the one that has the information earlier than there’s information. You know who they’re. Industries and scenes require connectors — individuals who facilitate relationships between others. Social media gives the look of placing us all inside attain of each other, however 35 years in the past, it was managed via magazines and phone calls. And on the heart of the Apple II software program universe was Margot Comstock, a lady virtually exceptional immediately however who was so necessary within the early Apple II period that based on Doom creator John Romero, her nickname was “The Glue.” Margot Comstock handed away on Friday, October seventh, 2022.

Comstock was not a developer, designer, or programmer. She was a journalist. In 1980, she and her husband, Al Tommervik, took over the editorial administration of a small advertising and marketing publication known as Softalk, owned by the writer Softape, and rebranded it as an Apple II enthusiast magazine. As a periodical, Softalk was {a magazine} that each challenged the pc hobbyist journalism trade and outlined the social terrain of the early Apple II software program period — which contained one of many largest libraries of software program — expressing the reducing fringe of what it was potential to do with a pc of 1’s personal.

“Softalk is not a programming magazine,” she declared within the magazine’s inaugural editorial, an astounding edict in 1980, when most pc magazines, like Byte and Creative Computing, had been targeted on programming. Comstock wrote that Softalk would privilege “journalistic style rather than technical data” whereas “piqu[ing] the curiosity and intrigue[ing] the intellect of everyone who owns an Apple.”

Comstock’s promise that Softalk was “not a programming magazine” wasn’t fluff: it was a salvo directed at a brand new class of customers struggling to make the Apple IIs and TRS-80s a expertise of on a regular basis life. Since Byte launched its first difficulty in September 1975 with an article on reusing built-in circuits, proudly owning a pc had at all times been understood as a uniformly technical pastime. But all through the late Seventies and early Eighties, customers wished simpler entry factors to computing, whereas {hardware} and software program makers wished entry to bigger markets. That meant computing needed to transfer past hackers and hobbyists.

Positioning Softalk towards the remainder of us reasonably than a homebrew hobbyist was a mirrored image of Margot and Al’s personal non-technical backgrounds. Before founding Softalk, the couple had journeyman jobs within the publishing enterprise — Al was a replica editor at Variety, Margot a contract textbook editor who’d minimize her enamel writing for in-flight magazines. These are occupational pasts that assist clarify Softalk’s overtly affable tone; in contrast to some journal founders, these two had been consummate writers.

They purchased their first Apple II with a windfall from Margot’s successful performance on the sport present Password Plus. There she crushed the competitors in a phase partnered with Loretta Swit (“Hot Lips” Houlihan from M*A*S*H). Though the couple by no means superior a lot past programming in BASIC, their Apple II swiftly grew to become the idea for brand new networks of neighborhood and dialog. Margot and Al appeared to have based Softalk for individuals like themselves: individuals extra excited by the social and cultural parts of computing than the technical. 

If you really liked the tradition surrounding the Apple II, Softalk was your Verge. The journal received its preliminary enhance when Comstock despatched first-year subscriptions of the journal free of charge to all 32,000 members of Apple’s buyer listing and mailed it for free to any Apple II owner who submitted their serial quantity. This low bar and, in some instances, no bar to entry ensured Softalk grew to become the de facto neighborhood discussion board of the third-party Apple II trade. The journal folded in 1984, taken down by the Software Shakeout that cratered a lot of the trade. Yet, for a quick span of years, Margot was the central operator for a nationwide community. 

Chatty, charming, and bursting with barely contained enthusiasm, Comstock and her journal proved an necessary locus for these early corporations, placing new software program publishers in touch with their first main distributors, understanding promoting offers, sharing information, and giving firm founders a way of influence and significance. The journal’s “Tradetalk” part posted the information on the newest hirings and firings with an insider sense of self-amusement (a proto-Twitter if ever there was one). Softalk revealed dozens of letters to the editor every difficulty, way over some other fanatic journal, nurturing a sometimes rote part of editorial content material right into a flourishing neighborhood bulletin board in journal kind. And the journal’s bestsellers lists, based mostly on gross sales reporting from precise retailers (reasonably than what publishers claimed they shipped), allowed the trade to acknowledge itself as an trade. 

All this made Margot and Al among the trade’s most trusted arbiters. They had been so well-known Richard Garriott included them as little characters within the city of Tommersville in Ultima II. Doug Carlston, co-founder of Broderbund, the software program firm that revealed PrintMaster and Mavis Beacon and video games like Prince of Persia and Carmen Sandiego, mentioned that via Softalk, the pair “pulled our little industry together, gave us all encouragement and a place to share news and ideas.” Carlston remembers the pair’s “brilliance and humanity.”

Margot’s pleasure for the Apple world stayed together with her previous Softalk’s heyday. Back in 1987, she participated in a Smithsonian group interview alongside different Apple II icons, together with Carlston, Sierra On-Line co-founders Ken and Roberta Williams, and Sirius Software’s Jerry Jewell. 

With each query pitched her approach, she bounces calmly on the couch, brimming with commentary; she takes all the interview barefoot, folds her toes beneath her, and talks with animated gestures. In a 2015 interview with documentarian Jason Scott, almost 30 years later, the spirit of the identical girl is clearly current — her eyes crisp, her smile delighted, her fingers in movement as she speaks of a bygone life. Scott remembers her as “a wonderful presence and full of pride in the work she did, and happy people remembered her; anyone who thinks of a computer is more than an appliance has her influence to thank.”

“With her game show winnings, Margot Comstock could’ve taken a vacation or added a new deck,” Scott mentioned. “Instead, she chose one of the toughest jobs in an industry nobody quite understood the potential of. She spent four years chronicling software and computers from a perspective that was sorely needed and still rings with quality decades later.”

I met her solely as soon as as properly, in 2013 on my first analysis journey to Silicon Valley, after I was engaged on a mission about Sierra On-Line. We met at an Applebee’s in Santa Rosa. She admonished me for ingesting Diet Coke (the chemical compounds) and chided me for desirous to file the interview reasonably than being able to take handwritten notes. She discovered my younger age of 31 exceptional, in addition to the concept that somebody who had by no means themselves used an Apple II, would care about her work. The dialog wasn’t a lot. She was one of many first individuals I had ever formally spoken with as a historian, and I used to be far too inexperienced in my very own interviewing expertise to know the precise inquiries to ask her or learn how to make a lady of her knowledge and expertise really feel relaxed. But she was affected person and type, and she or he gossiped with enthusiasm about these days. I’d at all times supposed to make one other go of an interview someday, however someday by no means got here, and now I can’t. She was an individual of such beneficiant and titanic pressure within the Apple II trade that I had devoted my forthcoming guide, The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, to her — a dedication which should now turn out to be “in memory of.”

Margot Comstock’s life and legacy are a chance to each have a good time the large contribution to pc historical past she left behind within the pages of Softalk and to reassess our assumptions about whose tales matter within the historical past of computing. While standard accounts usually journey over their heels to inform the exuberant exploits of the younger males turned heroes of their trade — like Carlston, Williams, and Garriot — few have thought to consider all the opposite work it takes to make an trade. Between the folds of historical past is the quiet labor of constructing boards, cultivating relationships, bridging social gaps, and doing the writerly and technical translating that makes sophisticated, opaque expertise accessible and thrilling to newcomers. The Apple II period was your world, Margot Comstock — and we simply benefited from it.