MikroDatorn

» see mikrodatorn.idg.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Lennart Zetterström and Lauri Pappinen put out the first issue in 1978. It was printed in A5 at Göstas Snabboffset in Stockholm, which is the production budget of a club newsletter, and it was about personal computers at a moment when the phrase still needed explaining in Swedish.

The Swedish record calls it the oldest Swedish magazine about personal computers. The English one hedges and points at Datornytt, which ran earlier and folded in 1991. Either way MikroDatorn outlived the argument by two decades.

IDG eventually took it into the family and settled it at seventeen issues a year. Inside that house it had a clear job: the technical title, aimed at readers who had passed the beginner stage, sitting above a sister magazine called PC för alla that was built for everyone else.

~ the record ~

~ the a5 years ~

A5 is half a sheet of office paper. A magazine that size, run off at a snabboffset shop, is a thing two people can carry out of the building themselves, and that is roughly how it started.

What it grew into was a benchmark publication. That is its own category of magazine: readers came for the test results, and test results are expensive to produce and easy to compare against the next title on the shelf. Being the more advanced of two IDG magazines is a good position right up until the publisher starts counting both of them in the same column.

~ folded into techworld ~

The print edition disappeared in 2007. It was merged with Nätverk & kommunikation, a networking title, and the two were issued from then on under a new name, Techworld. That is the death that mattered, and it is the one most summaries of the magazine leave out.

~ the name went last ~

MikroDatorn kept going online after the paper stopped, which bought it another four years. Then on 31 March 2011 the website became part of PC för alla under the name PC för alla extreme, narrowed down to components. Graphics cards and motherboards, mostly tests and news.

The extreme site was shut a few years after that. Of all the names in this story, only PC för alla is still in use.

~ what sweden kept ~

The first issue predates me by six years. It was also Swedish, written for a hardware market with its own prices and its own distributors, in a language I have never learned. Component tests do not travel without translation, and nobody was translating a Stockholm benchmark title for Ankara. The paper edition was finished before I had any means of looking.

Two things survived. The first two issues are scanned and posted at stonan.com, so the A5 original is still readable. The domain mikrodatorn.se belongs to a business school in Malmö now and redirects there without comment.

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