Micro Cornucopia

~ the obituary ~

It started in July 1981 as a newsletter for owners of one specific machine. The Ferguson Big Board was a single-board CP/M computer that you bought as a board and turned into a computer yourself, and David J. Thompson, who had been an engineer at Tektronix, began publishing a bi-monthly for the people doing it. The masthead called it The Micro Technical Journal. Everyone called it Micro C.

It widened quickly, first to the other board-level machines and the Kaypro, then to hobbyist computing generally, and what distinguished it was that it never stopped printing the actual engineering. Circuit diagrams and source code ran in the body of the magazine as a matter of routine, next to articles on robotics and embedded systems, and occasionally on things no other computer magazine of 1986 was covering, like three-dimensional graphics or the specific needs of disabled users. Bruce Eckel wrote for it years before he wrote the C++ books. The publisher also ran a free annual conference in Oregon called SOG, the Semi-Official Get-together, which people flew to.

The distance here is a price on the back of the masthead. A year of Micro C was $18 in the United States, $26 to Canada or Mexico, $36 anywhere else by surface mail and $50 by air. Surface mail meant a bi-monthly magazine about soldering arrived by ship, two or three issues behind, and the orders went to a post office box in Bend, Oregon, payable in US funds on a US bank. In May 1990 I was six, and the nearest modem was still years off, though age is the smaller problem here. To read this magazine while it was still current you needed an American mailbox.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Circulation stayed modest throughout and nobody involved seems to have minded. What it had was a readership that built things and wrote about building them, which is why the staff list reads like a small engineering firm rather than a publisher: a technical editor, three associate editors, someone doing accounts, and two people answering the phone from nine to five Pacific. There was a bulletin board on 503-382-7643, running up to 2400 baud, eight bits and no parity. SOG VII in 1989 was one of the last ones held in Bend.

~ the last hoorah ~

Issue 53 is dated May 1990, costs $3.95, and carries a red FINAL ISSUE flash across the corner of a cover about microcontrollers. The column it opens with is titled The Last Hoorah. Thompson begins by admitting he cannot find the words. He has started the editorial, he says, "so many times, in my daydreams, in my sleep, in the shower," and nothing he has come up with really feels like he feels. Then he says it. He is closing down Micro C and he does not know what he will be doing next. He adds a joke about his mother reading the announcement and clearing out the spare room.

He also explains why it is closing rather than changing hands, which is the question a reader would actually ask. Three separate groups had come forward wanting to take the magazine on, and after long discussions none of them could assemble both the money and the talent to make it work. So he placed the subscribers instead. Computer Language took most of them, with AI Expert and Embedded Systems Programming as alternatives, and a quarter of the list already subscribed to Computer Language anyway. He notes that when a magazine folds, which he calls a strangely appropriate word, the other magazines usually pick up the subscribers, and that the only readers nobody had wanted in recent memory were the ones left over from Profiles and CP/M Review.

One of the suitors had offered to keep running Around the Bend in its entirety, which he says led to a lengthy discussion about sanity. Asked in his own column where he was headed, he answered: nowhere. He had spent his whole life in student mode, he wanted time that was not already spoken for, and he had been feeling at odds with everything lately.

~ the garage sale ~

On page 74 of that same issue, beside the end of the farewell column, there is an advertisement headed MicroC Garage Sale. The office was selling its hardware. A Visual 50 terminal, like new, $60. Twelve eight-inch single-sided floppy drives, mostly Shugart 801s, $10 each. A hundred and thirty boxes of unused eight-inch disks at $5 a box. A complete Cromemco S-100 system with boot disks and manuals, $75. Two very used but working Kaypros at $100 each. Nine hundred Intel 2764 EPROMs by the tube. Seventy Baby Blue Z80 cards that Thompson had been saving to announce at the end of a series the magazine folded before finishing.

And two Big Boards. One in a cabinet with two drives and a power supply for $75, one in a keyboard case for $50, listed by a publisher who wrote "we have (shudder) Big Boards for sale" in the column alongside. The magazine that existed because of that board was now selling it off at $75. The ad copy promised Genuine Antiques and No Cliches, then ended with the only guarantee the staff were prepared to offer: everything had worked the last time they used it. All 53 issues are now scanned and on bitsavers, which means the circuit diagrams outlasted every machine they described.

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