By the late 1940s, television stations and home receivers were becoming a reality. Gernsback felt his ''Radio-Craft'' magazine needed a new name; it should be short and contain the word "Television". When the staff could not decide on a name, they sent a survey to 500 readers with 13 proposed names. Over 50% of the readers selected a name that was included just to expand the list, ''Radio-Electronics''. Gernsback accepted his reader's verdict and used the title that did not use the magic word of the period. ''Radio-Electronics'' appeared as a subtitle in early 1948 and became the primary title in October 1948.
1950s and 1960s
Early radios and televisions used vacuum tubes that had an operating life time of a year or so. (The transistor would not become dominant until the 1970s.) A typical television would have a dozen vacuum tubes and one or more would fail each year. Radio and TV repair shops were numerous and located in every neighborhood. A significant portion of ''Radio Electronics'' articles and advertisements addressed the service industry.Technological advances such as the transistor, color television, stereo audio, computers and space satellites were prominently covered in the 1950s and 1960s. The typical ''Radio-Electronics'' cover would show a person interacting with new technology. Hugo Gernsback would write an editorial each issue; and the magazine would publish stories about the future such as automobiles automatically guided down the turnpikes of tomorrow. The April 1959 issue was 8.5 by 11 inches (22 by 28 cm) and had 140 pages. The monthly paid circulation was about 200,000 readers.
1970s
The tag line on the Radio-Electronics cover from July 1970 to February 1974 was "For Men With Ideas In Electronics". Almost all of the readers of electronics magazines were male. A Ziff-Davis survey in 1981 showed that 97% of the readers were male. In April 1972 the cover did not have the tag line and there was a letter to the editors from a female reader titled "Women With Ideas In Electronics." The editors asked readers to write in on what would be an appropriate tag line. The "For Men With Ideas In Electronics" returned the next month and stayed until March 1974 when the tag line was changed to "The Magazine with New Ideas in Electronics." In one last affront to the feminist movement, the June 1974 cover of ''Radio-Electronics'' has a young lady in a bikini by a swimming pool with that months feature project, a guitar amplifier.Around 1971, many authors who used to contribute to ''Popular Electronics'' started writing for Radio-Electronics. There was some competition in digital logic projects between ''Radio-Electronics'' and ''Popular Electronics''. In September 1973, ''Radio-Electronics'' published Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" and in July 1974 it published Jon Titus's "Mark-8 Personal Minicomputer". However, ''Popular Electronics'' published the most famous project in January 1975 with the MITS Altair 8800 computer.
After ''Popular Electronics'' went under after attempting to become a computer magazine in the early 1980s, ''Radio-Electronics'' published many eye-catching feature projects like a series on cable TV descramblers. Some projects were designed by kit manufacturers like PAiA Electronics, North Country Radio, Information Unlimited, Almost All Digital Electronics, and Ramsey Electronics.
1980s and 1990s
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Radio-Electronics, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
