Ahoy!

~ the obit ~

Issue 26 of Ahoy! is dated February 1986 and costs $2.75. The word above the masthead is COMMODORE USERS, and the cover lines offer an auto-exec cartridge you build yourself and a 1541 alignment check, under a banner reading WE'RE NUMBER ONE. That is the whole magazine in one image, a monthly for people who owned a Commodore 64 and fully intended to program it.

Ion International published it out of New York from January 1984. The numbering reached issue 61, dated January 1989, and that is where it stopped. Five years is a respectable life for a magazine tied to one machine, and the machine was the Commodore 64.

The proportions are what stand out. Reviews and software surveys were in there, but Ahoy! printed games in BASIC and in machine language every single month, and occasionally straight assembly source as well. That February 1986 cover sells a bundle of games and a tutorial on structured programming in the same breath, and the reader it is aimed at wanted both.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ type in the listing ~

The core of Ahoy! was program listings. They were printed as pages of text that you retyped into your own machine line by line and then saved to tape or disk, which for a decent-sized game meant an evening of work before you found out whether the thing ran at all.

Flankspeed was the magazine's answer to the obvious problem. It was a checksum loader: you entered the machine-language listing into Flankspeed rather than straight into the computer, and it verified each line as you went and told you where the mistake was. Every magazine of the era had some version of this, which is a good measure of how often the failure happened.

~ the amiga problem ~

Ahoy! covered all of Commodore's color machines, and from 1985 that meant the Amiga as well as the 64, two audiences with very little in common. The answer was Ahoy!'s AmigaUser, spun out of a column of the same name. Its first two issues went out in May and August 1988 in place of the parent magazine rather than beside it, which is an odd way to launch a spin-off and a fair signal of how thin the publisher was spread. AmigaUser ran six issues and its last is dated February 1989, one month after Ahoy! itself ended.

~ issue 61 ~

Nothing dramatic is recorded about the ending. There is no farewell editorial anyone quotes and no bankruptcy story in the trade press. Issue 61 came out in January 1989 and there was no issue 62. Commodore went on selling the 64 for another five years, but the American market for a monthly magazine about it was finished, and the titles that survived the decade did it by becoming magazines about PCs.

The distance here is era. I was a small child when Ahoy! printed its last issue and I came to computers a decade later, into a house that had a modem in it, where the way you got hold of a program was to download it rather than retype it off a page. By then the practice the magazine existed to serve was already over. What reached me instead was the downstream version of the same impulse, where somebody else had already done the typing.

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