Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented Byte.

[2] At the time, DEC had an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 machines being used in educational settings, so he was surprised to find the number of subscribers reach 20,000 after 18 months.

He found that many subscribers did not have a DEC machine but were using Edu as a source of general information on computers in educational settings.

During this period he collected many user submissions to Edu and convinced DEC to publish 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973.

Other divisions within DEC saw these inexpensive machines as a threat to their own products and agitated against them, causing debates that eventually worked their way to the CEO.

When the new designs were personally canceled by Ken Olsen with the statement that "I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own"[3] Ahl quit DEC and took a position at AT&T.

[2] Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.

In January, the Altair 8800 had been announced and Ahl began looking for new authors who could write for the exploding microcomputer market.

At that point, the magazine started actively looking for advertisers and the November/December 1976 issue was the first to be printed on coated paper rather than newsprint to provide better quality ads.

When Ahl and his business manager began tracking it down, the police were called and found that two people in their company had embezzled $100,000 by sending some incoming cheques to their own account at a different bank.

Nelson would arrive at 5 pm and work all night, waking Ahl in the bedroom when he started printing on a Qume daisy wheel printer.

[8] Through this period, featured writers included Robert Swirsky, David Lubar, and John J. Anderson.

The magazine regularly included BASIC source code for utility programs and games, which users could manually enter into their home computers.

[10] Through the early 1980s, and especially with the launch of the IBM PC, the market began to shift from a hobby-and-educational oriented one to more and more business applications.

Ziff quickly shifted the focus of the magazine to be more software-oriented, and the programming articles disappeared shortly after the sale.

[12] The company also began publication of several other magazines at different times, but none of these were very successful and tended to have very short production runs.