Loadstar

» see loadstar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Loadstar was a magazine you could not read. It arrived as a double sided floppy disk, you typed LOAD "*",8,1 to open it, and the menu that came up held programs rather than pages. The name is that command, bent toward the word lodestar. Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana had been doing this for the Apple II since 1981, and in 1984 it did the same thing for the Commodore 64, which by then was the cheapest serious computer in American homes.

The early issues were mostly Apple software carried across, because that is what the staff knew. It became its own thing quickly. From issue 9 to issue 61 it was the official disk supplement for Commodore's own magazines, so the type-in listings printed in Commodore Magazine and Power/Play came ready to run on a Loadstar disk instead. Some early issues shipped with client software for a new online service called Quantum Link, which had been pitched hard to the magazine by a marketing man named Steve Case. Quantum Link grew into America Online. A newsstand copy in 1988 cost $9.95 and came with two disks.

Fender Tucker was hired as managing editor in November 1987 and ran it for thirteen years, up to issue 199. He gave it a voice, which is a strange achievement for a product delivered as a disk directory, and he invented a building to publish it from. Jeff Jones arrived and built the Loadstar Letter, a printed companion that eventually ran to 73 issues. Barbara Schulak ran the Puzzle Page, which became the most durable feature the magazine had. In 1989 Loadstar published DigitHunt, a number puzzle that may be the first implementation of Sudoku on a home computer, sixteen years before the newspapers found it.

Softdisk lost interest around issue 146 in 1996 and sold it to Fender Tucker and Judi Mangham, a Softdisk co-founder, trading as J&F Publishing. What happened next is the reason it has a headstone here. It kept coming. Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and the magazine carried on without it. Softdisk's own newer disk magazines for DOS and Windows died before this one did, and so did Compute's Gazette and Commodore Magazine and the rest of the printed trade around the machine. Loadstar was still mailing disks to subscribers in the year YouTube launched.

~ the record ~

~ the tower that was a basement ~

Tucker's editorials described the magazine as being produced in the Loadstar Tower, a landmark looming over Shreveport. The offices were in the basement of a small single story building on Common Street. Everyone involved knew this, which is the joke, and the Tower turns up in the editorials for years with the straight face maintained throughout. He also kept an alter ego called Knees Calhoon, a musician credited as the author of software Tucker had written himself.

~ the subscriber curve ~

Issue 72 was the last one you could buy from a shop. After that it was subscriptions and mail order only, which for most magazines is the end and for this one left sixteen more years of life. Around 1991 about 20,000 people were getting a disk every month. By 1994 that was down to roughly 5,000, and by 2000 it was about 1,000, too few to be a business and too many to simply abandon. The later years leaned on contributors in Britain, where the C64 scene stayed alive longer, and the games picked up a demoscene accent as a result.

None of this was reaching me. A subscription magazine mailed as a physical disk inside the United States had no route to a kid in Turkey, and when I first dialed up in 1998 the computer it served had already been out of production for four years. What I have of it is the archive, which is how almost everyone outside America meets it now.

~ the tornado ~

In January 2001 Dave and Sheri Moorman of Holly, Colorado took over the editing and the business side, with J&F still owning the title. Moorman kept a monthly magazine going for a computer two decades old with a four figure subscriber list, partly by reprinting the good material from the glory years.

On the evening of 28 March 2007 an EF3 tornado came through Holly. It stayed on the ground for nearly half an hour across a 28 mile path, and it killed a resident of a town of about a thousand people. A large share of the houses there were damaged or destroyed, and so was the setup Loadstar was being assembled on. Moorman made issue 248 a free pass-around issue that November and got issue 249 out. In 2008 he stepped away. The official count stops at 249 issues against a plan that had run to 256.

~ issue 250 ~

Issue 250 existed as a beta. Richard Derocher, who had been testing it, finished the editing and put it online on 17 June 2010 as four disk images, two years after the magazine had stopped. It was never official and nobody charged for it. A magazine that had always been shipped as a file ended as a file, released by a reader, for a computer that had been out of production for sixteen years.

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