Bajtek

~ the last words ~

Bajtek's first issue is dated september 1985. I was one year old. By the time I had a machine and a line of my own, everything this magazine did had moved onto the internet, and in Turkey the energy Polish kids put into a magazine's reader clubs went into forums instead, into threads on donanimhaber and signature blocks listing every part in your case. Same instinct in a different container, which is showing strangers with the same hardware that you know what you are talking about.

The magazine was put together by Władysław Majewski, who was running the computing section of the engineering weekly Przegląd Techniczny, and it went out as a supplement to other papers because a standalone computer title was not a thing the Polish press had yet. The name is a diminutive built on the word byte, and it was a nod to the American BYTE, which nobody in Poland could buy.

Context matters more here than in most of these. In 1985 a ZX Spectrum in Warsaw was something a relative had carried in from abroad. There was no shop to ask and no manual in Polish. Bajtek was both of those, and the first issues sold over two hundred thousand copies with no returns, in a country where almost nobody owned the thing the magazine was about.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

In autumn 1985 Aleksander Kwaśniewski, then editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych and freshly appointed minister for youth affairs, made attaching Bajtek to Sztandar Młodych one of his first decisions in the job. Majewski read that as an assault on the magazine's independence and walked away from the title he had created. Kwaśniewski went on to become President of Poland ten years later. So the first political intervention in Polish computer journalism was carried out by a future head of state, in his opening week, over a magazine about the ZX Spectrum.

The sponsor was the Polish Socialist Youth Union, which put a communist youth organization on the masthead of the publication teaching Polish teenagers to write software. Waldemar Siwiński took over as editor and ran it through the years that counted. The publisher changed five times between 1985 and 1996, which tracks the country underneath it fairly precisely.

~ the inheritance ~

Bajtek printed BASIC listings you typed in by hand, page after page of them, and if you made one mistake the program did not run and you went back through it line by line looking for it. Around the listings there were reader letters and small ads for hardware. There was a Golden Disc awarded to the best computer club that wrote in, and a games section that handed out titles like King of Games. Circulation settled around 55,000.

It also produced most of the Polish computer press that followed. Komputer ran from 1986 to 1990 and Moje Atari from 1990, and the spin-off that Polish gamers of that generation actually remember is Top Secret. By the mid nineties the specialist titles had taken the readers and the country had an ordinary computer market with ordinary advertising in it. A general magazine explaining what a computer was had no job left. The last issue came out in september 1996, and a one-off nostalgia number was printed in june 2016 for a retro event in Warsaw.

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