Moj mikro

» see mojmikro.si as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Žiga Turk edited the first issues and handed the job on in 1987. The magazine had started in 1984 under ČGP Delo, the Ljubljana publishing house behind the newspaper of the same name, and later sat inside its magazine arm Delo Revije. It was a general computer monthly in a language with around two million speakers, which on its own should have made it a small object.

Until 1991 it also came out in Serbo-Croatian, which put the same magazine in front of readers from Ljubljana to Skopje and made it one of the most widely read computer titles in Yugoslavia. A home-computer market that was partly built on gray imports and partly on a domestic machine like the Galaksija needed somebody to explain it, and for most of the decade this was the magazine doing it.

The March 1986 cover is a good summary of the register. It is a photographic composite of erupting volcanoes with dinosaurs in front of them, a man in animal skins sitting in the middle, and the cover line reads "Obisk pri Kremenčkovih: Sinclairov ZX spectrum", a visit to the Flintstones. The price is printed in dinars, which dates it as firmly as anything inside.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ reading it from two countries away ~

I was born the year it launched and I cannot read a word of it. Slovene is not a language Turkish readers pick up by accident, and nothing about the Yugoslav computer press reached Ankara, where the 8-bit era arrived through a different set of importers and a different set of magazines entirely.

What is legible across the language barrier is the hardware. The specification tables and the model numbers in a 1986 issue are the same specification tables printed everywhere else that year, which is roughly the only thing globalization had managed by then.

~ the brand changes hands ~

From the early 2000s the problem was the ordinary one. Copy sales fell and advertising fell faster behind them. The 2008 circulation figure of 10,000 was already a long way down from where the magazine had been in the federation years, and by the 2010s the parent publisher was in trouble of its own.

So the title was sold. Delo Revije passed the Moj mikro brand to a company owned by Bojan Požar, a Slovenian publisher better known for political and tabloid work, and he did not arrive with a plan for a computer monthly. The editorial team worked that out quickly and closed the magazine themselves with the summer issue of 2015.

The scans outlasted everything else. Complete digitized runs exist for June 1984 to December 1993 and for January 2005 to December 2009, and anyone can open them. The domain went the other way. mojmikro.si now redirects into media24.si, a Slovenian publishing portal, and nothing on the page you land on mentions the magazine at all.

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