Its content consists of some combination of text, graphics, multimedia, and executable programs, and it is normally specific to one particular computer platform or operating system.
Some ideas of putting bar codes into paper magazines, which could be read into a computer with the appropriate peripheral, were floated at the time, but never caught on.
Shortly afterwards, in July 1978, the first issue of CURSOR magazine was released for the Commodore PET.
CLOAD was not the first electronic periodical, however, because various ARPANET digests had been published as text files sent around the network since the early 1970s.
Also, at the time, few people outside of academic institutions had access to this forerunner of the Internet.