In the years 1990–92 Brian Boese was a regular contributor to Loadstar, a disk magazine for the Commodore 64, for which he created a total of eight programs and a title graphic/text file:
The only one of these programs about which you can still find some information on the Internet is Stack 'Em, and most of it is wrong, since the release year is usually given as 1996. But Stack 'Em appeared in issue #90, which came out in November 1991, if I calculated correctly (#200 appeared in January 2001).
Stack 'Em is essentially a Commodore 64 version of Columns, based mostly on the Macintosh version, and it was supposed to be named Columns, but since a commercial SEGA game of this name had been released in the previous year, the magazine insisted on having it renamed. When Brian Boese ported it to DOS three years later, he released it as Columns.
The Loadstar magazine is still extant, though it is not sold on disks any more, if you subscribe, it will be mailed to you as a ZIP file. The first 199 issues, as well as several selections, are available on CD-ROM.
LOADSTAR was one of the very first disk-magazines ever published. In 1982 Jim Mangham got the idea of a monthly magazine on disk filled with programs, graphics and text that people would run on their computer. In 1984 the first issue of LOADSTAR, a magazine for the Commodore 64/128 computer was launched and over the next 15 years and 199 issues, a LOT of stuff was published on these disk magazines. Now, every bit of it has been converted to fit on one CD that you can run on your PC — and there's still room on the CD for more old LOADSTAR things like music, JPGs of the color covers of the issues, and much, much more.
