on three

I recently received a great collection of On Three magazines and I am working through them to fill in some of the holes in the collections on the net. I have started scanning on the tail end of the run, partly just because they were the easy ones. As of the March/April 1989 issue, the format of On Three was reduced to more of a newsletter, only 16 pages long, without the nice colorful covers that they had previously. The audience for Apple /// products and news had taken a sharp downturn, and On Three dropped their 800 number, shrank the magazine, and moved to Chicago. There are still nice articles in these last few issues, but it is kind of saddening to see it dwindle out. Despite that, the enthusiasm continues to show through, but it’s clearly an era ending, when the machines were getting well obsolete and when Apple’s support was essentially entirely gone.

From the 1990 issues, I have only the first and the last, the last of them being only 8 pages long. I don’t know if it continued beyond that issue.