Hebdogiciel

» see hebdogiciel.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hebdogiciel closed in the first week of 1987. My own first modem was eleven years further out, and by the time software started reaching me it came on floppies and then down a phone line. Typing a program in off a printed page was never something I had to do, which means the central act of this magazine is one I can describe but cannot remember.

The first issue went out on 7 October 1983, eight pages, launched at the SICOB trade show in Paris. Gérard Ceccaldi was editor in chief from that week until the last one. The publisher was Shift Éditions and the format was a newspaper rather than a glossy: cheap paper, weekly, sold at the same kiosk as the sports pages.

The proposition at the start was simple and slightly insane. Readers wrote programs at home for whatever 8-bit machine they owned and mailed the source in. The magazine printed it as a listing to be copied back out by hand at the other end. The Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC and the Oric and the TI-99/4A all had their own dialects of BASIC, so the same idea had to be typeset several times over. The magazine paid for what it printed and ran contests for the best submission.

Within a year the listings had company. Hebdogiciel started running news and software reviews in a tone that has no modern equivalent in a consumer publication, because no modern consumer publication is that free. It refused advertising for long stretches specifically so it could keep doing this. One cover line translates roughly to sorry, computers are garbage. IBM and Amstrad were among the companies attacked by name, in print, weekly, by a paper that depended on none of them.

~ the case file ~

~ what you actually did with it ~

A type-in listing is source code published in a newsagent's paper. The reader is the compiler. You sat with the magazine propped open and typed several pages of BASIC into a machine with no undo. Then you spent longer than the typing had taken hunting for the one character you got wrong. Magazines eventually added checksums per line so the machine could tell you which line was broken, which helped and did not help enough.

The economics of it were unlike anything since. The software in the magazine was written by its own readers, for free or near it, and the readers paid for the paper it was printed on. Nobody was licensing anything. The distribution medium was ink, and the copy protection was that copying took an evening. Carali drew for it, and the drawings were laid into the listings themselves rather than sitting in a separate art page, so the code and the joke shared a column.

~ the fights ~

A regular section called Bidouille-grenouille carried tips, and the tips included how to get around copy protection on commercial games. A weekly paper telling a hundred thousand people how to duplicate the products of the companies it also reviewed was not a position that could be held quietly. Another section, Mini-mire, listed Minitel servers worth dialing, which was its own kind of trouble in a country where the phone company owned the network.

Shift Éditions widened the target. It set up the Hebdogiciel club so members could buy software as a block, and it launched other titles alongside, L'Intox and Amstradhebdo among them. The French sources record several lawsuits arriving in that period. One of them followed a cover hoax announcing an Amstrad with 5.25-inch drives, a machine that did not exist, which readers waited for instead of buying the ones that did.

~ what replaced it ~

Ceccaldi shut it in January 1987 and the French accounts of it use the word lassitude rather than any financial cause. The timing was not accidental even if the decision was personal. French home computing was consolidating that year and the field of machines was narrowing. A paper whose whole comic engine was a dozen incompatible computers arguing with each other had less to work with every month. Michel Desangles and others went off to write for Joystick Hebdo and what came after. Le Virus Informatique is usually named as the indirect descendant.

hebdogiciel.fr today is a Gandi parking page, four hundred words of registrar boilerplate on the address of a paper that once told IBM what it thought. The 168 issues survive as scans on French abandonware archives. Which means the listings are still there, and they are now images of code: you can read every line, and to run any of it you would have to type it in by hand, exactly as intended.

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