PC Plus

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

~ the eulogy ~

Future launched two magazines at once in the autumn of 1986: 8000 Plus for the Amstrad PCW and PC Plus for the Amstrad PC. The first two issues of PC Plus were supplements bound into another magazine, so the first one to reach a newsagent was issue 3, cover-dated December 1986. The magazine told that story on itself in 2009, scanning the whole of its own first issue and posting it.

What it settled into was the serious end of the shelf. PC Plus was written for intermediate and advanced users, people who wanted to know how the machine worked rather than which one to buy, and it ran programming columns for most of its life. Huw Collingbourne had a column called Rants and Raves. Julian Bucknall wrote a computer science column called Make It: Theory for seventy consecutive issues, ending on Alan Turing.

On 3 September 2012 the magazine's own social accounts carried a short post saying issue 326 had just gone to the printers and would be the very last one. The issue was cover-dated October and reached shops on 11 September. Future said nothing of its own, and Press Gazette wrote the story up three days later under a headline about tech magazines closing, with Nintendo Gamer named in the same story.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was on the disc ~

PC Plus carried a cover disk from June 1987 and is said to have been the first British magazine to do it, a claim that rests on one source and that I would not swear to. What is beyond argument is how much of the magazine's identity ended up on that disk. The Internet Archive holds 292 of them. The branding tracked whatever consumer storage had just become affordable. It was the Coverdisk while that meant a floppy and the Super CD once CD-ROM arrived in 1994, and by 2005 a single issue shipped with more than one disc on the front.

That object traveled where the magazine did not. A cover CD in a Turkish shop around 2002 was not bought for the magazine attached to it, because the magazine was usually Turkish and the disc was usually the whole reason. Whole Linux distributions reached people that way years before anyone was going to pull one down over a TTNet line. The British magazines were a different market entirely, but the disc was the same technology doing the same job.

~ the number that mattered ~

Future published its own ABC figures as a listed company, so the decline is documented year by year. The January to December 2004 period gave PC Plus 50,100, which made it the biggest of Future's three PC titles that year, ahead of PC Format on 39,269 and PC Answers on 28,330. Seven years later the figure for 2011 was 11,076, down 19.3 percent on the year before. Press Gazette put the 2000 number at over 100,000 a month, though ABC's own page for that period shows no figures at all, so treat the hundred thousand as trade press memory rather than an audited line.

One small thing the issue numbers hide: PC Plus came out every four weeks rather than every calendar month, so 326 issues took 26 years rather than 27. Issue 234 was October 2005 and issue 326 was October 2012, which is 92 issues across 84 months.

~ who finally said why ~

The missing explanation arrived from outside the building. Bucknall, writing his own goodbye on 14 September, said Future had decided the magazine was no longer economically viable and that the full-time staff had been redeployed to other titles. Future's line about accelerating digital growth belongs to the six gaming magazines it closed between September and December that year, not to this one. PC Plus never got an executive quote or a stated cause. It got a Facebook post on a Monday afternoon, and then the domain started pointing at TechRadar, where a few hundred articles still carry its byline.

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