Elrad

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

~ the obituary ~

Elrad was a German-language electronics monthly for a semi-professional readership, sold on German newsstands, written for people who read schematics for pleasure. I have never held a copy. What I know about it is what everyone outside Germany knows about it, which is the magazine it gave birth to.

Heinz Heise published it out of Hannover from November 1977, under the subtitle Magazin für Elektronik und technische Rechneranwendungen. It ran monthly for two decades on circuit projects and build articles. In 1992 it swallowed a rival, Der Elektroniker, which stopped existing as a separate title.

Heise published the last issue it owned in June 1997 and then sold the name rights and the subscriber base to Bruchmann Verlag. Bruchmann put out issues from July 1997 until it went bankrupt the following year. The final Elrad is dated August 1998.

~ the case file ~

~ the supplement that outlived it ~

In 1983 Elrad carried a supplement called computing today, aimed at readers whose attention was drifting from analog electronics toward the microcomputer. Heise split it out into a magazine of its own. That magazine is c't, and it is still being published, forty-odd years later.

So the arrangement reversed itself. For most of the 1980s c't was the thing that had come out of Elrad. A decade on, Elrad was the thing c't had come out of. The parent kept its own readers, the ones who wanted a working circuit rather than a benchmark, and that readership was shrinking in exactly the years the computer readership was growing.

~ the bruchmann year ~

What Bruchmann bought in 1997 was a trademark and a list of subscribers. The staff and the archive stayed in Hannover. It published for roughly a year, and German electronics forums still carry complaints from readers who were billed for a 1999 volume that never appeared, which is how a magazine's death registers on the subscriber's side of the transaction.

Heise kept the part that could be kept. In December 2005 it released a two-disc DVD archive with facsimiles of every issue it had published, 11/1977 through 6/1997, in the original layout. The Bruchmann issues are not on it, because the rights to them could not be cleared. English Wikipedia files the magazine under 1997 disestablishments, which is the year Heise let go of it rather than the year it stopped.

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