CERTIFICATIONS

• PC Magazine's most famous gaffe occurred in January 1989 when the annual Technical Excellence Award was rendered on the cover as "Technichal Excellence."

• PC Magazine was responsible for the development of PC Labs, which was the first comprehensive laboratory for benchmarking software and hardware. The "lab" workers even wore white coats in the beginning.

• The magazine has undergone four major redesigns in its history, in January 1986, June 1989, July 1992, and February 2000. The original "PC" logo, which was replaced by a variation similar to the current one in 1986, resembled an old-fashioned dot-matrix printout.

• The Editors' Choice award was known as the Editor's Choice award until many people complained that the latter was grammatically incorrect.

• The PC Magazine utilities began as printed lines of code in the back pages of the magazine. Users were expected to type this code into editors and compile it themselves. When PC Magazine launched its Web site, and for some years thereafter, the utilities were available for free download, but now they are distributed on a paid-for basis.

• PC Magazine was once known for its colorful three-dimensional bar graphs, which were considered visually attractive but allegedly also confusing. The graphs were abandoned in the 1992 redesign.

• From its inception in mid-1987 to the June 1989 redesign, the After Hours section was printed "backwards" in that the first page of the section was actually the last page of the magazine. This had the advantage of allowing a person to flip the book over, open the back cover, and begin reading the reviews in their logical order.

• For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, PC Magazine ran a proprietary online service on CompuServe called PC MagNet. This was an offshoot of an earlier effort called the PC Magazine Interactive Reader Service.

• For many years, the magazine's Pipeline and now-defunct Trends section listed the top-10 and then top-15 best-selling software packages. From 1988 to 1992, this list was conveyed through a colorful but bizarre bar-graph display that included lines tracking the five-week selling history of each package. In the March 1997 15th-anniversary issue, an editor admitted that "we didn't understand it either."

• The magazine was once so thick that it included an index of advertisements and a separate index of advertisers in addition to an index of editorial reviews. These indices were in addition to the standard table-of-contents at the front of the magazine.

• To commemorate the launch of IBM's PS/2 machines in the summer of 1987, PC Magazine ran a playful cover with the name "PS" Magazine.

• During the 1980s, the magazine's writers and editors used the XyWrite III word processor, even though the official Editors' Choice award went to WordPerfect. (For several years in the mid-1980s, the magazine divided its blockbuster word processor reviews into different sections for "professional," "corporate," and "personal" word processors.)

• John C. Dvorak's column is probably the most popular feature of the magazine, and messages from his fans and detractors have been a constant presence in the Letters section since the mid-1980s.

• PC Magazine was known for a while to consistently misspell Apple's 'i' products; "iMac" would be spelled 'Imac', 'iPod' as 'Ipod' and so on. Whether this was a deliberate action isn't known.