Retro Review

» see retroreview.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Retro Review was a British magazine about fifteen-year-old computers, photocopied and posted out to people who had paid for it in advance. In 2002 the computers on my mind were the ones in the internet cafe down the road, running Counter-Strike on whatever Pentium the owner had bought that year, and a mail-order paper zine from England had no route to Ankara at all.

Retro Review called itself the first multiformat magazine dedicated to old computers, and multiformat is the part of that claim that matters. Almost everything else in the scene was tied to a single machine, a Spectrum fanzine or a Commodore one. This covered whatever its two editors felt like covering, which is only possible when the two editors are also the publisher.

Jorge Canelhas and Ian Gledhill founded it and then did every job on it themselves. Issue one is dated 15 January 2002: sixty pages, A5, a color cover wrapped around a photocopied interior. Linux Journal wrote it up that April, which is roughly the entire contemporary press coverage.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five issues in twenty six months ~

Wikipedia files it under irregularly published magazines, and five issues between January 2002 and March 2004 is what irregular looks like when you say it with numbers. That is an issue roughly every five months.

The fifth one, dated 15 March 2004, was the last. Nothing announced it and nothing explains it. The date we have is the one printed on that final issue, and no announcement of a closure exists anywhere.

~ the pdf ~

Here is the small turn in it. From 21 January 2003, Retro Review started going out to subscribers as a PDF alongside the printed copy. A magazine about obsolete hardware, produced on a photocopier, reached for the delivery method that was about to make photocopiers unnecessary. It managed two more issues after that.

The website was retroreview.com, and the news page there is where all three of its exact dates come from, the two issue dates at either end and the day the PDF edition started. Five issues, and the record of them is better than what survives for magazines that ran twenty years.

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