Commodore Disk User

~ the last words ~

The argument for Commodore Disk User was attached to the front of it. Every issue carried a 5.25-inch floppy, and the pitch aimed squarely at people who owned a 1541 drive and had lost patience with typing programs in from printed listings. Argus Specialist Publications put the first one out with a November/December 1987 cover date at £2.50, from 1 Golden Square in London, bi-monthly, on the third Friday of every alternate month.

The disk also let the magazine carry software that would never have fitted in a listing. A type-in program has to be short enough that a reader will actually type it, and a disk has no such ceiling. That was the whole commercial case, and it held up well enough for the magazine to go monthly from issue 13 in late 1989. I was three when it launched, and the C64's Turkish life never ran to a cover-disk magazine of its own, so this one is read rather than remembered.

Stuart Cooke edited the first eleven issues with Fin Fahey as his deputy. Paul Eves took over at issue 12, the September/October 1989 number, and stayed roughly two years. The magazine shared a stable with Your Commodore and Your Amiga, and those titles moved around together whenever the business underneath them changed.

It ended at issue 36, numbered Volume 4 Number 12, cover-dated October 1991 at £3.25, by then published out of Milton Keynes. Your Commodore stopped the same month at issue 84. Neither magazine says why.

~ the record ~

~ rescued once ~

In the middle of 1990 Argus Specialist Publications closed its computer magazine operations. The editorial in issue 22, August 1990, records what that felt like from inside it: "Six weeks ago it appeared that my world, and that of thousands of other C64 users, had come to a sudden and dramatic end."

The same column explains the rescue. Argus had decided, "amid much controversy", to shut the division down, and for those six weeks the future of Commodore Disk User and its two sister titles was uncertain. All three were then taken on by Hasnain Walji, managing director of Alphavite Publications, at Unit 20, Potters Lane, Kiln Farm, Milton Keynes. The editorial prints that address in full capitals, the way a man who has just been handed a new one does.

Fourteen issues separate the rescue from the end.

~ the last editor's first column ~

Issue 36 opens with an editor's comment that reads like the beginning of something. "And so ends an era", it starts, meaning that Paul Eves had decided it was time to seek pastures new, not that the magazine was finished. Rik Henderson, newly across from Your Commodore, announces he is taking the editorship, quotes a reader who had once written in to say "if Rik ever gets hold of CDU, it'll be a disaster", and answers it head on: it is not a disaster, and "we can offer you a better title from now on".

He then sets out his credentials, on the grounds that you would not want a complete stranger exercising a dictator-like grip on the magazine, and signs off wishing Eves good luck. The rest of the issue is entirely ordinary: a File Menu installment, a patch for Flight Simulator II, a disk utility, some GEOS tools. Nothing in it suggests this is the last one. The better title went on sale and then never came back.

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