Back in the 1970s, Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse Magazine launched a new magazine called Omni. Omni was devoted to science, the paranormal, sci-fi/fantasy stories, and technology in general. My parents would pick up copies regularly and so they became fundamental objects in my childhood.
Omni Magazine was the Wired Magazine of the 70s & 80s. Everyone from Nobel Prize winners to UFO crackpots were interviewed. News of new and fascinating inventions and ideas were a regular part of the magazine.
Recently I thought about a story I read in Omni at this time and wondered what ever happened to the magazine. I did a quick search on ebay and was happy to find plenty of copies.
I bought the 12 issues from 1982, my last year of junior high school, when I was intrigued with computers, BBSs, girls, and the science in general.
As I flipped through the pages, the old neurons flickered to life as I recalled many of the images and stories as if it was only yesterday when I last saw them.
The fiction is from well known authors such as Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Greg Bear, Isaac Asimov, Fredrick Pohl, Dan Simmons, Frank Herbert, and Ben Bova. Hell, the July 1982 issue has Burning Chrome by William Gibson in it. Omni Magazine was THE place for the launch of the internet age. The same people that were cobbling together usenet, the internet and building BBSs were reading Omni Magazine every month.
Here’s and ad for the revolutionary service, Compuserve. Twenty-three years ago, they were trying to reel in customers with promises of online finance, travel info, games, and images. Not much different from what AOL offers today. In some ways the world hasn’t changed much.
The funniest part of the magazines is looking at the ads. Ads for booze, cars, and cigarettes are bascially the same as today. But the technology ads are blast. Seeing the IBM ads for their computers starring their the Charlie Chaplin lookalike are incredibly dated.
Check out the ad above about the Panasonic knockoff of the Sony Walkman. It should be a reminder to the iPods fantatics as to what lives ahead for Apple’s current hit product. Back in the early 80s, the Sony Walkman was the defacto standard for personal audio, bouyed by Sony reputation and great product, but as the market matured, Sony any semblance of an edge and personal audio player were completely commoditized, made by the cheapest vendor.
It won’t take long for the iPod’s currently huge marketshare to drop once the the inevitable market forces (and the Walmart factor) take hold. Seeing the ads for Betamaxes, cassette players, and cordless home phones remind me that whatever today’s hot tech items are, they’ll be on sale for $20 in a few years at the local discount mart.
Back to Omni, I’m glad I took the time to look into the past. Once I’ve read the fiction, I’ll probably put the magazines back up on ebay for someone else to read.
When I was in high school, the first space shuttle was launched and my school was invited, along with hundreds of other schools, I’m sure, to come out to Edwards Air Force base for the landing.
It was like that scene in Contact, where they are driving through the desert to their launch site and zillions of freaks of all stripes line the roads. Somewhere between Road Warrior and Woodstock as vibes go.
Anyway, our bus parked about a mile away (probably more like a half mile) from the landing strip, right next to the Omni Magazine bus, which was filled with shaggy-looking writers, photogs, and the like.
After the sonic booms and the landing, which we could barely see, I remember the Omni guys inviting us to climb up on the roof of their bus to take a look through their massive telephoto lenses at the shuttle crew milling around outside the craft on the landing strip. These guys were as geeked up about reuseable space vehicles and the impending civilian space flight industry as any of us high school kids and it was cool to be around.
And I remember reading Burning Chrome in Omni when it came out.
Maybe I’ll buy ’em off you.
Wow… I never thuoght about that, OMNI being the Wired of its day. Only OMNI didn’t suck.
I was 70476.1414 on CompuServe from 1981 until 1995. They were never the same after being bought out by the evil AOL but in their day they were the shiznit.
I bought every issue of Omni from #2 (sometime in 1978 or 1979, I think) until about 1985. They’re stored over in some friend of mine’s parents basement. I’d go and get them, but there’s nowhere to put them.
I loved the artwork and the sci-fi stories. The covers were always amazing, like the early Wired covers.
Thanks for the reminder!
I was just looking up Omni to see if there were any trace left of it. Found an old article from 97 regarding the move from paper to online entity. Looks like it made the transition and then died very quietly.
I loved that rag, I subscribe to New Scientist now but it’s a real weak sister. My favorite issue is from November of 86, the article was called Tiny Tech and it was the first time I had heard about Nanotech. A young Eric Drexler tells of the future and it’s one we are just starting to see come around the corner now. Pretty Cool.
R.I.P Omni
Mike
my story is amazingly similar to yours. I think it was the first magazine i read regularly. My parents bought every issue.
I once brought it to school in the 8th grade. One of my nutty teachers thought it was evil and chastized me. “Do your parents know you read that trash?” he asked me. I think perhaps he had it confussed with another guccioni mag.
It is at least 20 years since I bought an issue of Omni – I still have a few in an old box and sometimes like to read them to remind me of happier days in my life.
The real shame about it’s demise is that there is so much stuff that it could do now: modern cosmology, Alcubierre’s warp drive, Tipler’s Omega point resurrection, mind uploading, CGI, the web, current ideas on extraterrestrial life etc etc. At least we can take comfort in the knowledge that somewhere else in the infinite multiverse the magazine is still going.
Long live Omni
Neil
I remember when Omni first came out.
Couldn’t find a copy anywhere in town (lived in Oregon…not too surprising at the time to be left out-of-the-loop).
One night – apparently at a party – i VAGUELY remember telling my roommate at the time that i’d accompany him to Crater Lake sometime.
He chose a Hangover Saturday in the middle of an Oregon winter to go.
He came into my room and woke my ass up from what i seem to remember was a great fantasy-dream of me and a local girl in the back of an airplane – my introduction to the ‘Mile-High Club’ – just to announce that “…today is the day.”
After telling him in a less-than-friendly-roommate tone to go sit on the toilet brush, he turned and walked out of my room…taking my bedsheets – along with my electric blanket – out the door and down the hallway with him.
Much later, after we had both sobered-up a bit more and got out heads together, we dressed for the cold and piled into his mid/late ’60s Ford.
After a couple of hours driving on snow-packed roads and coming face-to-face with death on a couple of patches of black ice (no LSD on that particular Ford), we made it to Crater Lake.
Lo and behold: in the main lodge of Crater Lake i found a copy of the PREMIERE issue of OMNI…their LAST copy to boot!
That issue was read cover to cover more than once. That’s all it took to make a subscriber out of me.
Somewhere in storage, that copy still lurks, along with a couple of stacks of back-issues waiting to see the light-of-day.
I’ll always remember in the silver-page section a story of a guy who mistakenly mixed some chemicals together and created some kind of foam that he threw into a bucket and left.
Later, he came back to find that the foam had hardened. He ran some tests and found it to be like concrete – yet much lighter AND naturally fire-resistant.
Realizing that he could use this in the construction industry to form practically anything, he planned on marketing this creation.
…wonder whatever happened to him and this invention? Never could find anything about it.
Sure do miss the magazine.
I am seeking an issue of OMNI. Problem is I don’t know which one. My subscription began in 1980. I entered a competition in the “games” section in, i think, ’82 and my subscription ran out before the results were published. I would not care except that I recieved a prize check months later and have never seen my entry results in print. Can anyone help me with as little as the month and year of the issue?
The competition was for video game concepts.
I am trying to get the text of a very short story called ‘The Eye of Reality’ by Robert Sheckley that was in Omni October ’82. I wonder if you could be so kind as to send me a photo or scan of it? Cheers, Andrew, Perth Australia
I’m from the UK and I remember seeing Omni on a daily programme called Nationwide. I thought it looked brilliant and got Omni from the first issue (I was 14 at the time) until the mid eighties. Two points I remember, it was the first magazine to talk about the Rubic cube, so I was the first kid at school to have one. Second, in the film 2010 the character Heywood floyd has a copy of Omni with him when he’s on the beach. As a geek stuck in middle England and seemingly the only one who liked space and science it was a great moment.
The Complete “Insert Favourite Magazine Name Here”
Omni, Vol. 1, No. 2 (November 1978) Brooke and I are buying ourselves The Complete New Yorker for Christmas, and…