73 Magazine

The Jefferson County Radio Amateur Club is reporting that 73 (also known as 73 Amateur Radio Today) is now available in full at the Internet archive. Direct URL at http://www.archive.org/details/73-magazine; it looks like the archive has been there for about two weeks. The magazine ran from 1960 to 2003; according to the Internet Archive there are 511 back issues available here.

If you’ve ever used the Internet archive this will look familiar to you; full magazine copies are available in a variety of formats, including online-readable, PDF, ePub, and Kindle. The issue I test downloaded was about 21MB, but the older ones from the mid-70s looked like they were over 50MB.

You can do a full-text search for the archives if you go to the Internet Archive advanced search and specify 73-Magazine as the collection to be searched. I did a search for antenna (you can use the search here to start your own search) and got over 280 results.

Steve Jobs in a 1976 copy of 73 Magazine

I don’t know too much about amateur radio, but I’m enough of a computer nerd to appreciate the diy hardware hacking and electronics articles (and the ancient advertising — the two page Altair 8800b advertisement carried me away on a wave of old-computer nostalgia.) If you get lucky you’ll also find a computing easter egg or two; an article in one of the issues I downloaded featured an article on an event called Personal Computing ’76 with a few paragraphs about (and a picture of) a 20-year-old computing guy named Steve Jobs.

The Internet Archive’s usual good work; a huge, easily-accessible collection for ham radio operators, early computer enthusiasts, and electronics hobbyists.