Popular Computing Weekly

~ the eulogy ~

Britain had no shortage of computer magazines in 1982. There was no weekly among them aimed at the people buying the machines, and that gap is where Sunshine Publications of London put its first issue on 23 April that year, edited by Duncan Scot, at thirty pence. The cadence is the thing to hold onto. A weekly on this subject was closer to a trade newspaper than to a magazine, and everything the title did followed from that.

Its coverage never specialized. Games sat next to business software, and no single machine owned the editorial line, which is unusual for the period and is why the back issues are still useful. The early covers carried commissioned artwork that was good enough to be worth noting and was gone by 1983. For three years from 1983 the back page was leased to an advertisement drawn as a comic strip, the Piman, which Automata UK of Portsmouth used instead of a conventional ad.

The adventure column is the part readers still talk about. It ran reviews and deliberately cryptic hints, and anyone who finished The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum was invited to write in and be entered in a Hobbit Hall of Fame. A weekly could run that kind of correspondence at the speed people were actually playing. A monthly would always have been behind the puzzle.

It closed when I was six years old, in a country where it was never sold. The only copies I have handled are scans, and they read like something made for a market small enough to walk around, which Britain in 1986 was and Turkey was not.

~ the dossier ~

~ a weekly in a monthly trade ~

The newspaper instinct shows up on the covers. The issue for 1 to 7 May 1986, volume 5 number 18, gave its whole front page to the headline "Two found guilty in hackers trial", with the Commodore supplement reduced to a flash down the left side. That is a news desk making a news judgment, in a week when the monthlies on the same shelf were working two issues ahead of the calendar.

During 1989 it absorbed Computer Gamesweek, a rival weekly, which left the format to one title again.

~ the price line ~

The cover price tells the story without anyone having to write it down. Thirty pence in April 1982, fifty by the middle of 1986. It held at sixty through 1987, with one jump to eighty pence on the issue dated 17 December 1987 and the next one on the shelf back at sixty. Then it drops. By early 1989 the price is fifty-five pence and it never moves again, not once in the eighteen months left.

A magazine raising its price is backing itself. A magazine cutting its price and then freezing it has stopped setting the number and started defending it.

~ counting to 429 ~

The numbering changed partway through. Through 1988 issues were cited by volume and number, so the 17 December 1987 edition is volume 6 number 50. By February 1989 the masthead was running a single continuous count, and the issue for 16 to 22 February 1989 is number 348.

Wikipedia's article ends the run at issue 415 in June 1990, and the weekly arithmetic puts 415 at around 14 June, so the claim is at least internally consistent. It is also wrong. Issues 424 through 429 survive with their cover dates and their barcodes, running from 16 August 1990 to the week of 20 September, all of them at fifty-five pence. Issue 429 is the last one anybody has.

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