Spectrofon

~ the obit ~

The ZX Spectrum died in Britain around 1990 and then had a second life in the former Soviet Union that lasted most of another decade. Russian engineers had been building their own clones since the eighties, machines like the Pentagon and the Scorpion, assembled from parts that were available rather than parts that were specified. There were a great many of these machines and almost no commercial press serving them. Spectrofon filled that hole, and it was never printed on paper at all. It came on a floppy disk.

A Moscow group called STEP Interactive put out issue zero on 30 November 1993, issue 1 on New Year's Eve, and then roughly one a month through 1994. Each issue arrived as a program with its own custom shell, graphics and loading music, written fresh every time, so the magazine was also a demo. Inside were the standing columns of any games magazine of the period: walkthroughs, release news, cheats and POKEs for infinite lives. Attached to each issue were two or three complete games or utilities, usually ones nobody outside the scene had heard of.

It was the first electronic magazine in Russian, and it became popular enough that imitators turned up fast. Adventurer, Deja Vu, Speccy, ZX Format and ZX Guide all followed it onto disk, and none of them reached the same readership. The disks were copied hand to hand and most of them carried copy protection anyway, on a publication whose only distribution method was being copied.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the dates really are ~

English Wikipedia cannot keep this magazine's own lifespan straight. Its infobox gives 1993 to 1997 and a final number of 24, while the body directly underneath says 23 issues were published in total. Then the page's own categories file it as a 1994 establishment and a 1996 disestablishment. Those cannot all be true together, and the article cites a single source for any of it: a page at zxpress.ru, the Russian archive that keeps the issues themselves.

That archive lists every issue with a release date on it. Number zero came out on 30 November 1993 and number 23 on 20 July 1997, twenty four issues end to end with nothing missing from the run. So the infobox is right, the body is wrong, the categories are wrong twice over, and the correction was sitting one click away in the source the article already cites.

~ the gaps in the calendar ~

The release dates are also the obituary, if you read them in order. Close to monthly through 1994, ending with number 9 on 30 September. Then 1995 slackens off into seven issues spread across eleven months, the last of them on 20 December. In 1996 there are five, and the fifth, number 21, lands on 4 December.

After that the magazine goes quiet for nearly six months. A promotional release for the next pair appears on 31 May 1997, and then on 20 July 1997 issues 22 and 23 both come out at once, which is what a publication does when it is clearing its desk. Nothing followed. The scene it was written for was being emptied out by cheap PCs, the same way the British Spectrum press had emptied out seven years earlier, just on a delay.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »