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COMPUTIST MAGAZINE
Synopsis from Apple2History.org
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This magazine began originally back in 1981 with the name "HardCore
Computing".  A flier mailed out during 1982 gave this description of the
magazine: "HARDCORE COMPUTING, a small magazine in Tacoma, Washington,
warns pirates about the latest technology that companies are using against
them. HARDCORE is a magazine dedicated to the Apple-user. There are a lot
of computer magazines, but HARDCORE prints the information that other
magazines refuse to print, information vital to you as a computer user."
By 1983 it was split into two separate publications: HARDCORE Computist
(devoted to "kracking"; see below), and CORE (devoted to general Apple II
topics). CORE was to have been published four times a year, but was
dropped after only a few issues. The first issues of CORE, during 1983,
covered graphics, utilities, and games. The third quarterly issue was to
have been about databases, but the games topic was substituted and the
database topic never appeared in print.

For the first four issues, the name "HARDCORE" dominated the title page.
Beginning with issue #5, "Hardcore" appeared in smaller type, with
"COMPUTIST" taking over a dominating position on the cover. By issue #27,
the name "Hardcore" was dropped completely from the cover. Although it
began as a glossy format magazine, this was discontinued with issue #45 in
1987, and with issue #66 in 1989 they changed to a tabloid format. The
publishers claim that one reason for the name change to simply "Computist"
stemmed from a complaint sent in by a young subscriber whose mother was
throwing out the magazine before he got it, because she thought it
contained pornographic materials!

Computist was, admittedly, in the business of teaching users how to
"strip". But this did not refer to X-rated topics, but the ability to
strip the copy-protection from commercial software. This technique, known
as "kracking", was a popular pastime for some software hackers of the day.
Using powerful programs such as Locksmith and Copy II Plus, Computist gave
specifics on how to make a disk work as easily as a standard Apple DOS
disk. The combination of ProDOS and un-protected commercial programs took
much of the wind out of Computist's sails, since the special help needed
to copy disks was no longer necessary. There were, of course, those who
used the techniques printed in Computist to "pirate" programs (duplicate
and distribute protected software), but many used it to standardize the
modified DOS so that the programs could be used with RAM disks, large
floppies, and hard disks.

Though it is still being printed, Computist is much different than it was
in its early days. It is no longer Apple II-specific, and has expanded to
also cover the Macintosh and IBM. Its publishing schedule has also become
rather irregular. Each new subscription still comes with a tutorial by Wes
Felty on disk de-protection and the use of a program called "Super
IOB".