Apricot File

~ the obituary ~

The last issue of Apricot File went out without a date on it. It was called Release 3.12, it appeared in September or October 1988, and the editor used his final column to explain where everyone had gone. Dennis Jarrett had edited all thirty six issues since October 1985. What he wrote in The Last Word was that subscribers were being steadily lost "to the beckoning lure of IBM-compatibility." The magazine had not stopped being good at its job. The machines it covered were losing.

It was published in London by TP Group, in A4, for people who owned computers made by Apricot. That was the entire brief. Apricot's machines ran MS-DOS and looked like the future when the first of them reached British dealers in 1983, but they shared no hardware with the IBM PC whatsoever, which in the first half of that decade was a defensible engineering position and by 1987 was a problem no amount of design could get you out of. A magazine built on one manufacturer inherits that manufacturer's arithmetic.

None of this reached Turkey. Apricot sold into British offices through British dealers, and the magazine went out to a subscriber list that was never going to extend to Ankara. Mitsubishi Electric had owned the hardware business for eight years by the time a 14.4k modem showed up in my house. Most of what is readable of this magazine today survives because one of its columnists kept his own copies.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

The contents were consumer reviews of Apricot hardware and software plus technical advice on programming the things. That sounds narrow because it was, but a single-vendor magazine in the 1980s did work that nothing else did. The manufacturer's own documentation was thin where it existed and wrong where it did not, so a magazine with a few hundred pages a year and a readership who had actually tried the undocumented parts became the real reference.

The regular bylines ran to a dozen names: Edward N Bromhead, Kathy Lang, Roger Gann, Mark Whitehorn, Paul Lavin and the rest, plus a pseudonymous cynic filed under Henry Deckhand. Everyone in that list was writing for a readership defined by what was on their desk.

~ the disinformation column ~

David Langford wrote The Disinformation Column from Release 1.2 in November 1985 to the final issue. Langford was already a science fiction writer with a reputation for being funny in print, and what he produced for Apricot File was technical work with the jokes left in: the inner secrets that Apricot PLC had documented wrongly or not at all, written up by someone who had found them the hard way. The era's standing complaint, printers which refused to produce a pound sign, turns up in his own summary of the run years later.

He collected the columns in November 2007 as The Apricot Files, 132 pages through Ansible Information and Lulu, and his back cover calls them justly forgotten. Bletchley Park's archive said the book would become an important item in their library. A single-vendor computer magazine is urgent while the vendor lasts and archival the moment it does not.

~ the last word ~

A magazine is normally dated by its final issue, and Release 3.12 went to the printer without a cover date on it, which leaves the ending as a month-wide guess in the one place you would expect precision. Thirty six issues across three years, closed by an editor who could see the subscription numbers and understood what they meant.

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