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Issue #210 January 2008
Happy Twentieth Anniversary
by Steve Ciarcia
Rather than celebrating, most people feel that they should be having their head examined after doing the same job for 20 years. If I really do the math, it gets even worse than that. This is the 20th anniversary of the start of publishing Circuit Cellar magazine, but the Circuit Cellar trademark actually came about 10 years earlier as “Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar” in BYTE magazine.
Since then, a lot has changed and nothing has changed.
I apologize for being nostalgic, but I learned a lot from my years with BYTE. The key to BYTE’s original success was that management and editorial approached publishing the magazine as a vehicle for expressing a common interest. Investigating a great new processor architecture or describing how a new spreadsheet program like Lotus 123 could change the world was published because we all felt that the readers would get the same exhilaration from the knowledge as we did. Editorial content wasn’t simply “that stuff” that filled the space around the ad pages.
The first half of my tenure writing “Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar” was an escape. Like many of you, I came out of college with lots of ideas and ambitions and wanted to make my mark on the world. The bad news is that most corporate employers want you to tow the mark, not set it. Certainly, my record of early job-hopping pales in comparison to Silicon Valley averages, but it seemed like a lot to me at the time. Convincing Carl Helmers that he could trust that I would show up with a design project on a scheduled basis solved my desire for “more spice than the day job” and it eventually led to everything today. What began as every few months soon became a monthly event and I had to make a decision. I quit the corporate day job and the second half of my BYTE tenure was strictly playing inventor and writer. (I was always an independent columnist and never a BYTE employee.)
It was a fun time, as I’ve mentioned in numerous editorials. Think of it as the equivalent of the years just before the recent dot bomb. Every idea was a potential product and everything looked like it would show immediate and guaranteed profit. Investors and companies were so addicted to venture capital that they ignored P/E ratio reality. The heady atmosphere of following the money trail is what prompted McGraw-Hill to buy BYTE and change it into a PC Magazine clone. It is also the reason that we parted company and I started the magazine you are reading now.
BYTE is gone, but we are still here for a reason. Deep financial pockets can’t create success where there is no focus and no readership. The greatest lesson I learned from BYTE was that as long as the staff, authors, and readers are all on the same page, there is a mutual interest, respect, and success that everyone shares.
I said that while everything has changed, nothing has changed. That’s how I describe Circuit Cellar. Our editorial content has evolved over the years to follow the changes in technology but not how the message is presented. Twenty years ago we had 2K×8 RAM chips and simple 1-MHz, 8-bit processors. Today, it’s gigaBYTEs and gigahertz. Certainly, the complexity of the projects we publish today seems considerably more involved than years ago, but it is only a reflection of how much more knowledge readers and authors have today. Full articles describing A/D construction using discrete components have been supplanted by one-line descriptions about processors with integrated functions and simple software routines because that’s how engineers treat the subject now.
Our editorial is a reflection of the level of knowledge shared among our staff, authors, and readers because, like the successful period in BYTE’s lifecycle, they are interdependent. Our authors are our readers; our readers became our authors; and our staff members were readers before becoming part of the magazine. For the few people who occasionally write and ask why we don’t have more introductory electronics articles, let me say that Circuit Cellar can never be an introductory magazine simply because the shared knowledge we publish is at the level of the working engineers, programmers, and professionals that make up the vast majority of our readership.
We are a successful niche publication because everyone, including advertisers, understands and respects what we have to do to maintain the status quo. Following the rainbow in a different editorial direction or selling out and publishing advertorial only unbalances the equation and dooms us all. The one absolute that hasn’t changed in 20 years is Circuit Cellar’s prime directive—don’t screw with the formula!
So, what does that mean for the next 20 years? While I probably will still be around, I’d have to really be insane to be writing a “Happy Fortieth” editorial. More than anyone else, I recognize that Circuit Cellar is the entity being preserved for the future and not Steve Ciarcia. Like the advantages demonstrated by network-connected distributed processing over outdated centralized control, Circuit Cellar is a team effort with lots of distributed responsibilities and decision makers. My rationale for not being critical to every process isn’t so that I can make a quick exit, it’s so the continuation of Circuit Cellar isn’t dependent on a single individual. Certainly, there will be a 40th year given the dedication I’ve experienced for the last 20. Perhaps we’ll make it a guest editorial so I can tell you how it all started again.
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