Happy Computer

~ the eulogy ~

The first issue, November 1983, was not called Happy Computer at all. It went out as Hobby Computer, and a German leisure magazine called Hobby took exception to the similarity. By the second issue, December 1983, the title on the cover had been changed to Happy Computer, and it stayed Happy Computer for the next six years. Markt & Technik published it monthly out of the Munich suburbs, which through the mid-1980s was roughly the center of gravity of the German computer press.

What made it unusual was that it refused to pick a machine. Most magazines of the period belonged to one computer and spoke to the people who owned it. Happy Computer covered the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum and MSX and the TI-99/4A in the same issue, which meant a reader spent half of every month reading about hardware they did not own. The appeal was exactly that. It was the magazine where you found out what the other side of the playground had.

None of this reached Turkey. There was no Turkish equivalent on a newsstand in 1987, and a German-language monthly about eight-bit machines was never going to arrive in Ankara by any route. The whole run was printed and bound into collections before most of this site's readers were online. It survives now as several thousand scanned pages on archive.org and the German fan sites, which is more than most magazines of its size get.

~ the dossier ~

~ hallo freaks ~

Every issue greeted the reader with the same two words. Hallo Freaks. It is a small thing and it tells you the whole editorial position: the audience was assumed to be obsessive and slightly embarrassing in public, and the magazine thought that was good. The pages were built for that reader. Comparison tests and tips, then page after page of program listings to be typed in by hand.

Some listings were too long to print. Those went out under a label called Happy Software, later simply Happy Computer, sold cheaply on datasette or floppy. A magazine running a budget software house on the side was normal in 1985 and looks strange now, mostly because the distinction between reading about software and owning it was still thin enough to step over.

~ the spin-off that outlived it ~

The games coverage started as a few pages and kept growing. From issue 11/1986 it had its own branded section, the Großer Spiele-Sonderteil, which ran until 9/1988. By then the section was big enough to be a magazine, so Markt & Technik made it one. Power Play went monthly, and a decade later it was still running while its parent had been gone for years.

The staff list is the other inheritance. Heinrich Lenhardt and Boris Schneider both wrote here early, and both went on to shape two decades of German games journalism. The magazine that trained them did not survive them.

~ the cover you could tear off ~

The end was a redesign. Markt & Technik decided the home computer audience was finished and that the future was the PC, so from issue 3/1990 the magazine became Computer Live, with a new look and a new remit. The transition issue carried the old Happy Computer cover on the outside with a perforation, so you could tear the familiar thing off and find the new magazine underneath. The February 1990 issue was the last to carry the old name, which is what the de.wikipedia infobox and the C64 and CPC wikis all record, against a line of prose in the German article that puts the switch a month earlier. Computer Live lasted until issue 11/1992 and then it went too.

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