Softalk

~ the goodbye ~

The money came off a television game show. Margot Comstock won fifteen thousand dollars on Password, and she and her husband Al Tommervik used part of it to start a magazine, topped up a few months later by an investor named John Haller and a second mortgage on their house. The name was already in use: Softape, an early Apple II software distributor, had a newsletter called Softalk, and when Softape renamed itself Artsci in 1980 the Comstocks took the newsletter over and turned it into a magazine. Softape's partners handed over storeroom space for the first office and showed up unannounced with desks when it moved out.

The first issue is dated September 1980. Apple Computer loaned the new magazine thirty thousand registered owner names and the first year went out free, after which it wanted paying. Within three years the readership was a quarter of a million and the magazine was on the Folio 400 list of the largest magazines in the United States, which is a strange place for a title about one computer to end up.

What set it apart from the rest of the shelf was the width of it. Most computer magazines of the period picked a lane and stayed in it, business software or professional programming. Softalk covered the whole Apple world, printing programming tips beside profiles of the companies whose games it had reviewed the month before, and now and then it printed fiction.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the chart ~

Every month Softalk ran a bestseller chart of Apple II software, broken out by category, and people in the industry treated it the way the record business treated Billboard. The method is why. Bestseller lists in software then were built from warehouse shipments, which measure what a publisher pushed out rather than what anybody bought. Softalk polled retail computer stores around the world and printed what those stores said had gone over the counter.

That chart is now the primary evidence for how well a lot of early Apple II software actually sold. Akalabeth charted exactly twice, both times in the bottom third, and those two weak placings are the main argument against the thirty thousand copies Richard Garriott has always claimed for it. Sirius Software, by contrast, had six separate titles in the top thirty during one month of 1981. A magazine that spent four years phoning shops ended up as the audit trail for an industry that kept no records of its own.

~ who was writing ~

The columnists were the people being written about. Bert Kersey of Beagle Bros had a column. So did Doug Carlston, who co-founded Broderbund, and Mark Pelczarski of Penguin Software, and Bill Budge, who wrote Pinball Construction Set. Bill Depew, author of Magic Window, was one of the Softape partners who lent the magazine its first room and later wrote for it.

Softalk Publishing also spun out siblings as the market widened: Softalk for the IBM PC, then ST.Mac once the Macintosh shipped. It took over Softline from On-Line Systems and renamed it ST.Game for the final issue. The disk magazine Softdisk started out partly owned by Softalk and was the only part of the operation that outlived it.

~ the 1984 slump ~

Issues had grown very thick very fast, which in magazine economics means printing costs you have already committed to against advertising revenue you have not yet been paid. When the software industry hit its 1984 slump the advertisers slowed down and the company was too thinly capitalized to absorb the gap. The usual response at that point is to skip months and publish whenever the cash allows. The Softalk board decided an unreliable magazine was worse than no magazine and stopped with the August 1984 issue.

Forty-eight months, and the Smithsonian now lists Comstock and Tommervik among the people who documented the microcomputer revolution as it happened. Comstock died in October 2022. None of this is a memory for me and the arithmetic says why. My first machine in Turkey arrived in the nineties, by which point the Apple II was a museum exhibit and the American computer-store network Softalk used to telephone every month no longer existed to be called.

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