Computing Today

~ the eulogy ~

Argus Specialist Publications already had an electronics monthly, Electronics Today International, and in the late 1970s it started running a computing section inside it. That section lasted four issues before somebody decided it could stand on its own. From March 1979 Computing Today was a magazine in its own right, with its own ISSN and a readership that thought of a computer as something you soldered before you used it.

The content stayed on that side of the line for its whole run. Hardware reviews and programming tutorials, plus page after page of program listings to type in by hand for whichever home computer you had. A year's subscription cost ten pounds fifty including postage around 1981, which tells you it was aimed at someone willing to commit in advance rather than someone browsing a rack.

September 1985 is the date on the final issue, and I turned one that year, in Ankara. Nothing here is reachable for me from memory. It closed before I could read anything at all, in any language. The autumn it went in was the autumn that ended the British home-computer boom, and no reason for the closure survives anywhere I looked, which is how a title behaves when it is one line in a publisher's portfolio rather than a brand somebody is protecting.

~ the dossier ~

~ bought the rival, kept the name ~

Some time after 1982 Argus bought Microcomputer Printout, which had started life simply as Printout, and folded the two together. That was standard practice in a market where a dozen monthlies were chasing the same readers: you did not compete with the magazine down the road, you acquired it and absorbed its subscriber list. Computing Today survived that merger by roughly three years.

~ the classifieds ~

What a magazine like this actually did for the British software industry happened at the back of the book. In 1981 three brothers in High Wycombe duplicated cassettes at home and posted them out against small advertisements they ran in Computing Today. That was Level 9 Computing, which went on to write some of the best text adventures anyone in Britain produced.

No distribution deal and no shop. A column inch in a monthly that cost a few pounds, plus a kitchen table with a tape deck on it. When the magazines went, that route into the industry went with them, and the next generation of British developers needed a publisher to get anywhere at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »