An interview with David Ahl

Interview byKevin Savetz, June 2003

Hi Kevin: Almost exactly a year ago, you sent me an e-mail with some interviewquestions and I promised to get back to you soon. So now you know what"soon" means to an old retired curmudgeon like me. Ironically, nowthat I'm semi-retired, I seem to have far less time to doextracurricular things than I did when I was working full time. It'snot because I'm making bad use of my time or sitting around in the sun(what sun?) but because my life is quite full with loads of otherstuff.

My Life Today

My lack of time stems from the fact that I've collected both thingsand things to do for when I finally have some time in my retirement.Things, for example, include a very extensive stamp and philateliccover collection--all-told more than 10,000 covers. Patriotic coversfrom WWII, First Day Covers from the 1920's (the first ones produced),satirical covers made by Hideaki Nakano, computers and technologyportrayed on stamps, cats on stamps, etc. As you can see, veryspecialized. Well now that I've come to realize that there is no onein my extended family that is even remotely interested in stamp andcover collecting, I've determined that it is up to me to dispose ofthem. I've seen far too many widows and children inherit a specializedcollection, not understand it or want to take the time to understandit, and then sell it for a tiny fraction of its worth. So I'm in theprocess of selling some of my collection, giving some of it tointerested museums, and giving the rest to young collectors juststarting out. All of which takes time--and a lot of it. "Things" alsoincludes a large collection of die-cast trucks, toy robots, computerart, militaria, hardware, and more.

The "things to do" category consists of literally three four-drawerfile cabinets full of folders of ideas for articles, short stories,and books. I have completely researched a highly-realistictechno-thriller novel on hijacking a train in the Channel Tunnel. AndI have another one set in the Siberian oil fields. When will I get thetime to set these down on paper (well, the computer)? Who knows?

I'm currently the editor-at-large for Classic Military Vehiclemagazine (UK). This gives me wonderful freedom to write about whateverstrikes my fancy, but also puts the burden on me to write a monthlycolumn (due this Friday) and a quarterly feature article. In addition,in a weak moment I promised the editors of three other truckrestoration magazines that I'd try to write three or four pieces ayear for each of them. All of which eats up time at an alarming rate.

I'm also keeping busy writing web sites. It started innocently enoughwhen I wrote a site for my own Military Vehicles magazine and thenconverted it into a personal site when I sold the magazine two yearsago. All I was trying to do is sell some of the old stuff that hadaccumulated in my basement, attic, and garage--humor and computerbooks, magazines, comic books, die cast toys, toy robots, philateliccovers, etc. Well I was getting only a trickle of traffic to my salessite, so I decided to put up some pages of content (mostly jokes andzany photos), which caused my web traffic to multiply by ten-fold.This then led to other people asking me to help them with their websites. So I wrote a site for our church, Mendham Hills Chapel, aballroom dancing studio, a community center, a missionary in China,and so on. It's really gotten quite out of hand.

And then there are those military vehicles of mine that I'm trying tofind the time to restore. I have a 1942 Chevy 1-1/2-ton tow truck thatwas used on an airfield in the Pacific. It's at the very beginning ofthe resto process and I was hoping to get it running this summer(ha!). I also have a 1971 M151A2 jeep that is quite far along--indeed,it was/is featured on the November 2003 page of the Craftsman Toolcalendar. I also have a 1987 ex-Marine Corps HMMWV back from Bosniathat runs fine but needs a lot of cosmetic work.

In addition to this stuff, I teach two Bible studies--one for men andanother for married couples, coach and pitch for the Market StreetMission softball team, serve as the Fellowship Deacon for our church,serve as an advisor to a couple of small companies, manage about $10million of investments for eight clients, manage the affairs of my91-year-old mother, read a daily newspaper, and read 10-12 magazinesand three books a week. So that's what is keeping me off the streetsso to speak.

30 Years Ago

What was my vision in 1974 when I started Creative Computing? Mybackground and vision was rather thoroughly documented in theexcellent article,"Dave Tells Ahl:The History of Creative Computing"by John Anderson in the 10th Anniversary issue of Creative Computingand I can't really enlarge very much on that.

About the only thing I can add to that article is that I think we usedto have more fun with computers per se than people do today. I guessthat's progress. Of course when I was in college at Cornell in1956-60, we had only two computers on the entire campus, one forcollege administration and one in the mechanical engineeringdepartment, which is where I learned to program in machine code.Imagine today if in your application program you had to keep track ofhow many bits--not bytes--you wrote on a track of the magnetic storagedrum so you could give a command to move the write head over to thenext track at the proper time so you didn't overwrite your previousdata. Yikes! I'm still blown away when I think of what we went throughto do the simplest calculation. You can't imagine how happy I was whenthey devised the concept of an operating system and "high-level"programming languages. My graduate assistantship at Carnegie-Mellonwas to convert the management game program, which was written in GATE,a small step above machine code for Bendix computers, to the new IBMlanguage Fortran, which I had learned in my summer job with GrummanAircraft.

To the mid-80's

Pertaining to the end of Creative Computing in 1985, the powers thatbe at Ziff-Davis had in late 1984 more or less made the decision toconcentrate on machine-specific magazines: PC, PC Week, Mac User, andso on. As a result, they put much less effort into selling advertisingfor Creative, so by the end of 1985 it was pretty obvious that wedidn't have enough advertising revenue to make a profit. I can't faultthem for the decision because it certainly worked for them over thenext few years.

But now, with 18 years of 20-20 hindsight, the decision doesn't looknearly as good. Look at PC magazine today compared with 10 or 15 yearsago. It's not nearly as healthy, whereas I believe that CreativeComputing could not only have survived but led the way into web sitedesign and coding. Indeed, I believe that Creative Computing couldhave become a highly-successful combined printed and on-line magazine.It was the natural next step, but Ziff was looking only a year or twointo the future, not 8 or 10 years out. This, in fact, is a major flawin many, if not most businesses: looking only for profits in the nextquarter or year and not further out. Clearly, you have to make enoughmoney to keep going but if you do that AND have a vision for thefuture, you'll be far better off.

Have I thought of restarting Creative Computing? Yes, but not for long.It's very expensive to start (or restart) a magazine in a saturatedfield, which computing is, and at my age (nearly 65), I just don'thave the time or energy to put together the necessary financialbackers, editorial staff, and marketing campaign to make it a success.When I look at the computing magazines on the newsstand today andoccasionally come home with an armful of them, I'm really disappointedin what I see. It's not that the magazines aren't good--some are--butthey are so specialized and so focused on such a narrow niche that Ifind only one or two articles in each that I read. I think that ageneral-purpose magazine aimed at beginning to intermediateenthusiasts/programmers could be wildly successful. And when I see thezillions of uncreative, poorly-coded web sites out there, I'mconvinced that there is a real need for a truly creative,easy-to-understand magazine (again, both printed and on-line) in thefield. I'd love to see someone start one and I'd love to contribute toit, but I'm just not the one to start it today.

What did I do after the demise of Creative Computing? Frankly, I doubtif anyone much cares, but I published Atari Explorer for five yearsand startedAtarian magazinein 1989 (only three issues) for AtariCorp. until they were buried by Nintendo in 1990. I also published amagazine for the Nabisco Corp sales and marketing staff, publishedseveral newsletters for rescue missions as well as publishing twonewsletters of my own (Effective Communication and EffectiveInvesting), did the direct mail fund raising for the Market StreetMission, and wrote a lot of freelance articles on all manner ofsubjects: computing (of course), travel, investing, and autorestoration (a long-time hobby of mine).

Some of these articles led to further business. My investing articlescaught people's attention and before long I had a nice little businessmanaging people's investments. I eventually wound up managing about$15 million for about 10-12 clients who liked my conservative approachand knowledge of high-tech industries.

However, I backed off this in 1996 when I got the opportunity to buyMilitary Vehicles magazine from the founders who wanted to retire. Themagazine was more-or-less a glorified newsletter and over the nextfour years I made it into a real magazine, doubled the advertising,increased the size of the magazine (to 180 pages), and built thecirculation to 17,000 plus. When Krause Publications expressed aninterest in it in 2000, I took the opportunity to sell it and cashout. I expected to stay on as the editor for the next five years (theyhad expressed a desire for me to do so), but after a year when mywritten contract expired, they found a younger (cheaper) editor inWisconsin, and gave me my walking papers. As a result, the editorialquality declined and they haven't managed to expand it much sincetaking over three years ago. Again, the big company focus on the nextquarter and the lack of vision for the future. Too bad.

Which brings us back to the present where I started this epistle. Letme encourage readers to visit my web site atwww.SwapMeetDave.com,press on regardless, read a lot, talk to God, have fun, learn from thepast, and live for the future. 'Nuf said.