Atomic MPC

» see atomicmpc.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ben Mansill founded PC PowerPlay, and then in February 2001 he founded Atomic, which spent the next eleven years as PC PowerPlay's only real competitor. The team on issue 1 was four writers. The strapline was Maximum Power Computing, and the subject was the part of computing mainstream PC magazines of the era would not touch: pushing a video card past its rated clock, and modding the case you had put it in. It also assumed you could edit a registry key or read code without being walked through either.

AJB Publishing put it out until July 2004, when Haymarket Media bought the publisher. Issue 50 landed in April 2005 and the hundredth came out on 8 April 2009, by which time the magazine was on its fourth editor and Mansill himself had left the company. Audited circulation ran to 29,948, which for a specialist monthly in a country that size is a healthy number. It was not enough.

On 9 November 2012 Mumbrella reported that Haymarket was closing the title and that the next edition would be the last. The letter David Hollingworth wrote to readers put it plainly: times were very tough in publishing across all forms of media, and Atomic had felt that struggle during the year. Issue 143 was the end of the print run. From the February 2013 issue onward the content appeared inside PC & Tech Authority.

~ the record ~

~ a magazine for people who voided warranties ~

There was a specific reader here and the magazine never pretended otherwise. Somebody who had already opened the case and who knew what their memory timings were. That reader existed in every country with a computer shop, including mine, and in Turkey around 2003 he was on donanimhaber or frmtr with his full hardware list pasted into his forum signature. I was that reader. I had a signature.

The magazine is the part that never arrived. An enthusiast press in print form did not materialize in Turkey at all, so the same conversation happened entirely in forum threads. That made it free and instant, and it also made it disposable, because a thread lasts exactly as long as the company hosting it. Australia got a monthly on the newsagent rack with a forum underneath it, and the magazine is the half that died first.

~ the green room ~

The forums launched the same day as issue 1, which in 2001 put the magazine ahead of most of the print industry. By January 2006 they held around 3,600,000 posts across twenty-one sections, including a general chat area called the Green Room, and the people in them called themselves Atomicans. Community meets got organized out of there.

When Haymarket closed the magazine in 2012 the forums were explicitly spared and kept the Atomic name. In 2018 nextmedia sold Haymarket's old computing assets to Future, and PC & Tech Authority was absorbed into APC in print and TechRadar online. The forums were still up through all of that. They finally went dark on 11 June 2020, seven and a half years after the magazine they were built to support had stopped existing.

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