Amiga User International

» see demon.co.uk/auimag as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

It started in November 1986 as pages bound inside another magazine. Commodore Computing International carried it as an insert, and the Amiga had been on British shelves for roughly a year, which is about how long a publisher needs to decide whether a new machine earns a title of its own. In January 1988 it got one. Amiga User International went independent and claimed, in its own lead sentence from then on, to be the first magazine in Europe devoted to the Amiga alone.

The masthead of the final issue says it was published 12 times a year on the first Thursday of the month, out of London with COMAG handling distribution. Underneath that is a line insisting the magazine was not connected in any way with Amiga Technologies or VIScorp. That sentence is there because by 1997 the Amiga had been through so many owners that readers could reasonably wonder whose payroll a magazine was on.

Four companies printed it across ten and a half years. Croftward Limited started it and held it to October 1990. Maxwell Specialist Magazines took it from November 1990 until 1992, when Headway Home & Law picked it up, and from 1994 the publisher was AUI Limited, a company named after the magazine it existed to produce. The archived scans carry those imprints on their own covers, which is how a publisher chain this tangled can be checked rather than taken on trust.

My own Amiga distance is not a regional one. The machine was sold in Turkey and the magazines were not, and my first modem arrived in 1998, a year after this title had already stopped. I read it as a 237 MB scan of a May 1997 issue, which says plenty about where the Amiga press ended up and nothing whatsoever about what it felt like to buy one off a rack.

~ the dossier ~

~ the insert that outlived its host ~

Commodore Computing International, the magazine it had been bound inside, stopped in 1990 after ten years. Its insert ran another seven. That cannibalism works in both directions here: Amiga Computing swallowed a separate games monthly during the 1990s, and Amiga Format ran on to May 2000 as the last big British title standing.

Its one piece of genuine engineering was the AUI SuperDisk, a numbered cover-disk series that used multiple file systems and heavy compression to fit far more onto a floppy than a normal magazine disk carried. The archived series runs from SuperDisk 04 in 1991 to SuperDisk 22 in April 1993, each one stamped with whichever publisher owned the magazine that month.

~ the amiga dimension ~

The editor's column was called The Amiga Dimension and Antony H. Jacobson signed it as Managing Editor and Publisher. The one in the last issue is not a goodbye. It is about an auction. Escom had collapsed, Amiga Technologies was down to what Jacobson called "what is left of" it, and a German liquidator was supposed to have picked a buyer for the Amiga immediately after 28 February 1997. Weeks later nothing had been announced.

Jacobson spends the column on Petro Tyschtschenko, who he reads as satisfied with selling off the last Amigas to Russia and Malaysia, and on liquidators in general, who he says keep a trusteeship running at so much per hour until there is nothing left. His verdict on the machine is that it "may now have been damaged beyond repair by the irresponsibility of these people". Then the issue ends. The magazine ended with it, and no reader was ever told.

Three years later Amiga Format closed too, and there was no longer a British Amiga monthly anybody could buy. The auction Jacobson was waiting on did eventually produce a buyer. The magazine that had been covering the Amiga longer than anyone in Europe was not around to report it.

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