SoftSide

~ the goodbye ~

The first issue opened by admitting the obvious. "There are those who might say we've got rocks in our heads for starting another computer magazine in the first place," it said, in October 1978, and then set out what the magazine would actually be: software, lots of it, "free for the transcription." It called itself your BASIC software magazine and it covered exactly one machine, the TRS-80 Model I, out of an office in Milford, New Hampshire.

Free for the transcription meant you did the transcribing. The listings ran down the page and you typed them into your own machine, line by line, and when it did not work you went back through looking for the character you had missed. SoftSide eventually published a utility by Jon R. Voskuil aimed squarely at that problem, named SWAT, for Strategic Weapon Against Typos. Later subscriptions bundled a cassette, and then a 5¼-inch floppy, so the programs could be loaded instead of retyped. A sister operation sold software by mail as the TRS-80 Software Exchange, renamed The Software Exchange after a copyright challenge from Tandy, and a hardware arm called HardSide was added alongside it.

The magazine then grew sideways across every machine it could reach. PROG-80 arrived in 1979 for programmers, AppleSeed in January 1980 for Apple owners, renamed SoftSide: Apple Edition under pressure from Apple while the original became SoftSide: S-80 Edition. In August 1980 all of it folded back together and went from digest size to full size, a change the magazine announced with a joke about readers no longer grabbing the TV Guide by mistake. Atari content came in with the same issue. PC Side followed in 1983 and Commodore Side in 1984.

~ the chronicle ~

~ free for the transcription ~

Publishing software as printed text is a strange business once you look straight at it. The magazine was the distribution channel and the reader was the installer, which left the error rate entirely as the reader's problem until SWAT shipped. It worked because there was no alternative yet: no shelf of boxed software in a store nearby, and certainly no network to pull it down. The programs were short enough to print and the audience was patient enough to type.

That stopped being true while the magazine was still running. Later issues drifted toward reviews and general articles, which is what a computer magazine looks like once the software it covers is for sale instead of for typing. The February 1984 issue was the first with no TRS-80 content in it at all, which for a magazine that began as a TRS-80 magazine is an ending you can point at.

~ nobody knows when it stopped ~

The published date is March 1984, and the citation behind it is a forum thread about PDF scans. Matthew Reed, who has cataloged TRS-80 publishing more carefully than anyone, will not go that far: he says only that there was at least one more issue after February 1984, and that SoftSide was finished by August 1984 at the latest. The Internet Archive's run stops at the February number.

The mechanism is better documented than the date. Like most of its shelf, SoftSide was caught in the 1983 shakeout of personal computer magazines, and Robitaille responded by splitting the title in two, one magazine for the user and one for the programmer, each with its own disk. Neither half found enough of a market to stand up, and the original name went down with them.

This grave files March 1984 at month precision, because that is what the record will support and no more. A year would be too loose and a day would be invented.

It stopped printing the year I was born, which puts it about as far outside my reach as a thing can get while still being a direct ancestor of everything I did later. The typing-in generation was over before I arrived. Software reached me on disks first and then down a phone line, and reading a program off paper into a keyboard was already a story told by people older than me. The last thing anyone can prove about SoftSide is a February cover with no TRS-80 on it.

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