Micro Mart

» see micromart.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In December 2016 subscribers got a letter. Micro Mart would stop with issue 1445, the last issue of that year, and the line the magazine chose for itself was "After 30 amazing years of telling it like it is, Micro Mart magazine is logging off." The arithmetic in that sentence is off by a year. The retrospective printed in the same final issue counted thirty one.

It launched in November 1985 as a fortnightly called Micro Computer Mart, and at the start it was less a magazine than a price list: classified advert listings for the computer trade, with editorial growing into the gaps between them. Readers pushed it to a weekly schedule in 1991. On 14 November 2002, with issue 723, it went from black and white to full color and the reader question column doubled in length, which tells you what the audience was actually buying it for.

The original publisher was MicroMart (UK) Ltd, run by Stewart Somerville and Roy Perrin along with Stewart's wife Fiona, out of Birmingham. Trinity Publications, a Trinity Mirror subsidiary, bought the company on 28 February 1995. Dennis Publishing bought the magazine on 12 June 2006 through a deal brokered by Ian Savage Publishing and filed it alongside Computer Shopper and PC Pro. Anthony Enticknap was editing it at the end, with Simon Brew overseeing, and by then the whole production had gone freelance and left the Dennis building.

No scandal ended it and nothing collapsed. A weekly print magazine needs a weekly print audience, and 5,422 is the sort of number at which a publisher stops signing the print order. The final issue is dated 22 December 2016 by the retro archive that indexes it, while secondhand listings put it at 29 December and Wikipedia says only that it appeared just after Christmas. For a magazine that came out every seven days for twenty five years, nobody can quite agree which week it stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ fifty pence and a pen ~

The farewell piece in the last issue describes the use case exactly: buying a copy for 50p, sitting in a bedroom with pen and paper, and writing down components from the adverts to build a PC that did not exist yet. That is what a classifieds weekly was for before the web. The adverts were the product, and the articles were what made people keep the copy.

The same function existed in Turkey, just never on paper. When I was pricing parts around 2003 it happened on donanimhaber, in threads where people posted what a shop in Ankara was charging that week, and the shops themselves were stalls you walked between. Buying a national weekly from a newsagent to find out the going rate for a hard drive is the British shape of that problem.

~ micro mart towers ~

The editorial office had a nickname, Micro Mart Towers, and a weekly column called Tales from the Towers that reported on the office rather than on the industry. The legal disclaimer at the back of the magazine ended with a few lines of office news. Columnists ran with their photographs beside them. Readers sent in pictures of their computer rooms and of Windows crashing in public on cash machines and photo booths, and the magazine printed those. When the office moved from Birmingham to London the column became Tales from the Shed, then stopped.

~ the amiga shelf ~

After Commodore collapsed the British computer press dropped the Amiga one title at a time. Micro Mart kept a regular Amiga section, which readers had asked for and which ran more than ten years, and no other English language commercial magazine still carried one when it closed. A weekly aimed at PC builders was carrying the machine the Amiga magazines had abandoned.

There was a forum too, a little over ten thousand registered accounts with a much smaller core that actually posted, and a chat room attached to it that was busiest between midnight and 2am. Jason D'Allison, who wrote the magazine's question column, ran a monthly evening session in there until October 2008, when he announced that the room had run its course. The last of those meetings was held that December. The domain micromart.co.uk is out of DNS now, so the forum went when the magazine did.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »