Sinclair Programs

~ the goodbye ~

Issue 35 is dated September 1985. By then the ZX81 had been out for four years and I was a year old, so this is a scan-only grave and that is the correct distance for it. A magazine whose entire product was BASIC listings for 8-bit Sinclair machines is not something anybody catches up with later. The listings only work if you own the hardware, and they only pay off if you are willing to spend an evening typing.

ECC Publications of London launched it in May 1982 as one of three Sinclair titles at once, the others being Sinclair User and a hardware-projects magazine called Sinclair Projects. The pitch was simple and almost entirely reader-supplied: send in your programs, we print the good ones, everybody else types them in. ZX80 and ZX81 listings first, then the Spectrum, and the ZX80 material stopped appearing after May 1983.

EMAP bought it in December 1984. By then the magazine had started behaving less like a pure listings book and more like a magazine, with letters and software reviews added in the March 1984 issue. Two Best of Sinclair Programs specials came out, one in 1983 and one in 1984, the move a publisher makes once the back catalog is worth more than the next issue.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty five pounds a listing ~

The submission notice in the back of the final issue sets the rate: twenty five pounds for the copyright of a listing they published. The entire economy of the magazine is stated there, in one line of small print. Readers wrote the product and the magazine bought the rights outright. Whoever wanted to play the result did the transcription by hand, debugging their own typing errors as the price of admission.

The address on that notice is Sinclair Programs, EMAP, Priory Court, 30-32 Farringdon Lane, London EC1R 3AU, phone 01-251 6222. Spectrum Computing's archive counts 35 numbered issues with no gaps and no renumbering, which for a British computer monthly of that decade is unusually tidy.

~ the reason they printed ~

Most of the magazines on this site stop without explaining themselves, and the cause has to be rebuilt out of circulation figures or a liquidator's filing. This one wrote it down. The closing editorial traces the shift "from amateur to professional, from 81 to Spectrum, from Basic to machine code", says the magazine changed with it but "remained mainly a listings magazine", and then gives the reason: "with the development of excellent professional software and with the appearance of budget ranges aimed at the impoverished computer owner we feel that there is no longer a need for such a magazine."

What killed it, then, was commercial software getting good and getting cheap together. In 1982 a type-in game was a reasonable way to get software onto a machine you had just bought. By 1985 the budget cassettes were on sale in the same shops that carried the magazine, and an evening of typing had stopped being a bargain.

The editorial sends readers to Sinclair User next month and thanks "the thousands of readers who have sent us their programs in the past". Then the issue carries on with its reviews and its listings, as though no announcement had just been made.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »