The Computer Paper

The Computer Paper was a (thick!) weekly free newspaper circulated for 20.5 years (from 1988 through 2008) on the streets of, first Vancouver, and then all over Canada, as the commercial emergence of the personal home computer became a reality for more and more middle-class households from sea to sea to shining sea. ("At its peak The Computer Paper was distributed from six offices across Canada, with a circulation of 365,000 copies a month in five separate, regional editions.") In addition to articles about general (and specifically Canadian) trends in consumer software and hardware and a heck of a lot of advertisements for local computer shops (like Babbages' or Egghead franchises, who would carry the newspaper), it would also circulate among its pages in hard copy local BBS listings, almost certainly reduplicating hard work already being done online in area code 604 by Roxanne Spear's Discovery BBS List and the Mind Link! BBS Link. For the local owner of a new computer with a [modem] and nothing to do with it, it served a critical link in the chain of giving a would-be cybernaut a first step into cyberspace, albeit a certainly distinctly Public Domain one.

Now-defunct Canadian tech businesses almost certainly profiled in its pages include: Ad Lib Inc., Advanced Gravis, Alias|Wavefront, ATI Technologies, Cardz (FracTerm), Corel Corp., Delrina Corporation, JDS Fitel Inc., Nortel Networks, Research in Motion Ltd., Sanctuary Woods Multimedia Inc., Softarc (First Class), Softimage Co., Tundra Semiconductor, VoodooPC, and Watcom International Corporation.

The magazine has a Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Paper , which includes full-issue scans from the '90s on the Wayback Machine.