After earning degrees in
electrical engineering and
business administration, while completing his
Ph.D. in
educational psychology, Ahl was hired by
Digital Equipment Corporation as a
marketing consultant in 1969 to develop its educational products line. He edited
EDU, DEC's
newsletter on educational uses of computers, that regularly published instructions for playing
computer games on
minicomputers. Ahl also talked DEC into publishing a book he had put together,
101 BASIC Computer Games. During the 1973 recession, DEC cut back on educational product development and Ahl was dismissed. Before he even received his last cheque, he was rehired into a DEC division dedicated to developing new
hardware. This group became caught up in building a
computer that was smaller than any yet built, intending to bring the new product into new markets such as schools. DEC built a machine combining a
PDP-8 with a
VT50 terminal, and another that crammed a
PDP-11 into a small portable chassis. When it was presented to DEC's Operations Committee, the engineering side loved it but the sales side was worried it would cut into the sales of their existing lines. The decision ultimately fell to
Ken Olsen, who finally stated that "I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own." With that, the project was dead. Frustrated, Ahl left DEC in 1974, and started
Creative Computing, one of the earliest magazines covering the
microcomputer revolution. For the next decade
Creative Computing covered the whole spectrum of hobbyist, home, and personal computing, and although Ahl sold the publication to
Ziff Davis in the early 1980s, he continued in his capacity as Editor-in-Chief. After the end of
Creative Computing he published
Atari Explorer and
Atarian magazines for Atari as well as non-Computer-related magazines and newsletters. In 2010, David Ahl helped re-publish a Special 25th and 30th Anniversary Edition of two of his classic programming books, specifically for a new
development environment for beginners, called
Microsoft Small Basic. In June 2022, Ahl released everything he had ever written, from prose to software, into the public domain. ==References==