Data Becker

» see databecker.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Data Becker was founded in Düsseldorf on 7 January 1981 by Achim and Harald Becker, two brothers in their late twenties whose father sold cars in the city. It began as a shop for computer accessories. What made it into an institution was the decision in 1983 to start publishing, right as the Commodore 64 arrived in German homes and several hundred thousand people discovered they owned a machine they had no idea how to operate.

By 1984 it was the largest computer publisher in the Federal Republic, turning over 39 million marks. The books were the foundation and the software came with them: the Goldene Serie of budget applications, and later the PC Praxis magazine that was printing 200,000 copies in 1994. Revenue reached 113.5 million marks in 1996. Around 2001 the company employed roughly 160 people and was still, for a German buying a computer at a department store, the obvious name on the shelf next to it.

Then the reasons to buy any of it went away one at a time. A reference book about a piece of software is a product with a competitor that costs nothing and is always current, and by the late 2000s that competitor was every search result. The software side had the same problem from the other direction, since the categories Data Becker lived on were consumer utilities of the sort that got absorbed into operating systems or replaced by a free app. Revenue fell from 113.5 million marks to something around 20 million euros. On 9 October 2013 the company announced it would close the following year.

~ the case file ~

~ the blue books ~

The house style was unmistakable and slightly forbidding: thick paperbacks with blue and white spines, set so dense that a page could be nothing but hex dumps and memory maps. Das Maschinensprachebuch zum C64 taught a generation of German teenagers 6502 assembly. Die Anatomie des C64 documented the machine at a level Commodore itself had not bothered with, down to the ROM listings.

The part almost nobody outside the hobby knows is that these crossed the Atlantic. Abacus Software of Grand Rapids, Michigan, had an exclusive arrangement to translate Data Becker's titles for the American market, and The Anatomy of the Commodore 64 is that German book in English, with Achim Becker himself among the credited authors. For years, if you were an English-speaking programmer who actually understood the internals of a C64, there is a good chance you learned them from a book written in Düsseldorf.

This is all before me twice over. The C64 years were finished before I could read, and German-language computer books had no route into Turkey at any point after that. I only found out where the standard English-language C64 internals book had been written while looking this company up.

~ the quiet close ~

The announcement in October 2013 said the business would wind down and that the remaining software products would be handed to other companies to develop and support. It did not give a reason. The German trade press noted the absence at the time and it was never filled in afterwards, so the official explanation for the end of the country's best-known computer publisher is nothing at all. On the way out, in December 2013, it released its iKnow ebook line as free PDFs.

Operations stopped on 31 March 2014, thirty-three years and three months after the shop opened. databecker.de now returns a 404. The hyphenated form, data-becker.de, resolves to a parked page running an ad broker that has no ads to show, so it prints the domain name to itself over the words "No advertisers available" and nothing else.

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