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Computer
magazines
This page lists - in date order of their launch - some of the UK's computer
magazines. The emphasis is on consumer titles, rather than trade magazines
for people working in the industry, such as Computer Weekly and
Computing, which have been around much longer.
With the advent of mass-market home microcomputers, particularly the
Sinclairs and BBC/Acorn micros, in the early 1980s, the range of titles
was diverse. A June 1984 survey in Campaign identified 46 titles
from 15 publishers. The leading companies were Argus, with 12 magazines,
and VNU with five. Other publishers were East Midlands Allied Press (now
Emap), ECC and Sunshine. There were two main types of magazines: user
specific and umbrella. Examples in the first category were Emap's Sinclair
User and BBC/Redwood's Acorn User. The best seller was the
umbrella title Your Computer published by IPC's Electrical Electronic
Press, with a circulation of 122,642 copies.
The next boom was spurred by Amstrad turning the IBM PC into a mass market
title, at first for business and later the home, with its cheap clones.
By 1990, the publishing directory Brad listed more than 160 magazines
as business titles and 30 in its consumer section. The biggest-selling
consumer titles were:
- Emap's Computer and Video Games at 92,060;
- Your Sinclair, which Future had just bought from Dennis Publishing,
at 78,393.
- Emap's Sinclair User at 76,055.
Other publishers were Interactive (Amiga Computing, Atari ST User,
Amiga Action and ST Action) and Newsfield (Crash, The
Games Machine and Zzap 64). Although these sales figures
look good, the writing was on the wall for the user magazines. All these
titles had lost 10%-15% of their sales in a year, with the rise of the
PC and dedicated games consoles such as the Nintendo. AS an example, Acorn
User's ABC fell from more than 57,000 in 1986 to 18,108 for January-June
1993.
Contributions on the many titles not yet covered - remember Dragon
User? Zzap 64? - would be welcome.
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CAD:
a bimonthly academic journal. The cover of the issue here (January
1980) showed a computer-aided picture by Paul Brown of the Slade
School of Fine Art
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IPC Science and Technlogy Press/Elsevier. April 1978-
Before there were computer magazines, there were academic journals,
such as this one, with an annual subscription for six issues a year
of £50 in the UK. The managing editor in 1980 was Alan Pipes,
who went on to edit CADCAM International at Emap. The sub-editor,
Tony Quinn, later launched Acorn User and other titles
at BBC/Redwood. |
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Personal
Computer World: the UK's first magazine for microcomputer enthusiasts
- in the days when you built your own
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Personal
Computer World Back
to top
VNU. April 1978-
The UK's first microcomputer magazine |
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Page:
for the Computer Arts Society
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Computer Arts Society. January 1980-
The Computer Arts Society was a specialist group of the British
Computer Society. The editor of the quarterly Page was
Dominic Boreham. The secretary and treasury of the group were, respectively,
John Lansdown and George Mallen. These two pioneers of computer
graphics were later to develop the CG-generated graphic for Channel
4. |
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Your
Computer, the May 1985 cover
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Your Computer
[closed] To
top
IPC's Electrical Electronic Press. 1981-?
In its December 1982 issue, Your Computer under editor
Toby Wolpe invented the cover disc. At at time, computer discs were
unknown outside the world of mainframes, so micro owners typed listings
in by hand. They then saved them as sounds on cassettes. With Your
Computer's plastic disc, played on a standard record player
at 33.3 rpm, computer programs could be input as binary sounds.
The disc held games for the Sinclair ZX81. In 1984, The Your
Computer was the bestselling computer titles, with a circulation
of 122,642 copies. It was always a stapled title, but lost out to
Personal Computer World, which stressed its business credentials,
was perfect-bound and felt classier.
IPC profile |
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Computer & Video Games: November 1981 launch issue cover
of the 'first fun computer magazine'
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Computer
& Video Games [closed] Back
to top
Emap/Dennis/Future. November 1981-August 2004
Computer & Video Games was launched by Emap and claimed
to be the world’s first games magazine. It was then sold on
to Dennis and finally closed by Future in 2004, though website lives
on. www.computerandvideogames.com
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Sinclair User: April 1982 for owners of the world's first mass
market home computer. Sinclair machines sold in their millions
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Sinclair
User [closed] Back
to top
Emap. April 1982-?
Emap was one of the first companies to get into home computer in
a big way. Its Business and Computer Publications division launched
home computer titles such as ACE, Commodore User, Computer &
Video Games, The One and Sinclair User. As well as
these its business titles included Educational Computing,
CADCAM International and PC User. |
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Acorn
User one of the many machine-specific titles that thrived in
the 1980s. It eventually closed in 2005
In December
1984, Acorn User launched a bar code reader and published
its programs in bar codes so readers did not have to type them in.
About 2000 of the devices were sold, mainly to schools
The
March 1985 cover based on a model by Russell Mills
Computer
graphics was always a strong point of Acorn User. The May
1989 issue focused on ray tracing
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Acorn User
[closed] To
top
July 1982- spring 2005. Addison-Wesley/Redwood/BBC/Europress/Quest
Design and Publishing.
Successful title for BBC Micro users that was set up maths publisher
Jane Fransella at Addison-Wesley with Acorn Computers. The BBC branded
the computer, which was made by Acorn in Cambridge, as part of its
Computer Literacy Programme to educate people about computers. At
the same time, the government gave computers to every school in
Britain (they could choose from a BBC Micro, Sinclair Spectrum or
Research machines Z80). From the outset, Acorn User used
electronic mail (Dialcom). It changed hands a year after its launch
to the founders of contract publisher Redwood
Publishing (Michael Potter, former publisher of Campaign,
Christopher Ward, a former editor of the Daily Express and
a non-executuve director of Acorn, and Christopher Curry, one of
the founders of Acorn). The company was later taken over by the
BBC. Redwood installed an large network of BBC Micros in 1984 to
replace its typewriters for journalists. (BBC titles such as Good
Food and Gardeners' World used the same technology until
it was superseded by Quark XPress running on Apple Macintoshes.)
Acorn User had a circulation figure of more than 57,000
in 1986. In January 1989, Redwood restructured to prepare for the
launch of BBC titles such as Good Food. Geoff Bains became
editor of Acorn User and Seamus Geoghegan becames publisher
of Acorn User and Educational Computing.
In 1993, Redwood sold Educational Computing to Training
Information Network and Acorn User (its ABC figure was
18,108) to Micro User and Acorn Computing publisher
Europress in Manchester. Although Europress said there was a future
for the all the titles, both of these were merged in to Acorn
User. The magazine's life was extended because Acorn spun out
chipmaker ARM, whose reduced instruction set (RISC) chips power
many of the world's mobile phones and devices.
An interesting diversion is that AU editor Tony Quinn
appointed two part-time assistant editors when the title was taken
over by Redwood: Bruce Smith and Alex van Someren. As a sideline,
this trio later set up a computer book publishing company, Victory.
Another AU contributor was Dave Atherton, then software
editor at BBC Enterprises. Victory later sold out to Dave Atheron
and Bruce Smith, who formed Dabs Press (from their initials) - which
later became Dabs.com.
Alex van Someren with his brother Nico founded nCipher,
a company that developed encryption systems using Arm processors.
Contributors to Acorn User included Mike Milne, who went
on to set up the computer graphics arm of Framestore
and create the Walking With Dinosaurs series; David
Deutsch, quantum computing pioneer at Oxford University; Malcolm
Banthorpe, BBC videotape editor who won two Bafta
awards for his work, including one for the computer graphics on
The Life and Loves of a She Devil; and Susan Stepney,
now professor of computer science at York university, who published
some of the earliest UK articles
on fractals in Acorn
User. Simon Dally, the competition editor, was a book publisher
(The
Henry Root Letters and
Rupert Cornwall's The Hacker's Handbook were two titles
he championed) who set up the world's first commercial online MUD
- Multi User Dungeon - with BT in 1985 (he said he found the Vax
minicomputer to run it on in a skip). MUD was based on the program
run by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw for four years on the University
of Essex mainframe.
BBC Magazines profile
Redwood Publishing profile
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Micro
Update first issue. It covered all the machine formats and
put women on its covers to appeal to male readers
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February 1983. Argus, London. 75p; 124pp. Editor:
Paul Liptrot
A feature on the British computer the Oric, reveals it was named
after Orac, from the Blakes Seven TV series.
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Personal
Computer News in
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Personal
Computer News [closed] Back
to top
18 March 1983-?. VNU
Felix Dennis was the publisher of this weekly. Cyndy Miles was the
editor. |
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Big
K launch issue - later issues featured a cartoon series - Shatter
- drawn on an Apple Macintosh, below
|
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IPC Magazines, London. April 1984. 85p. 108pp.
Ed: Tony Tyler; pub dir: John Purdie
Games title with free cassette. Based on readers typing in games
listings. First issue had programs for the Commodore Vic20 and 64,
Oric, BBC/Acorn and Sinclair Spectrum.
In issue 12 (March 1985) it launched a comic strip - Shatter -
drawn on an Apple Macintosh, which claimed to be a world first (by
Mike Saenz, Peter B. Gillis and Mike Gold). A one-off comic
Shatter was published in the US dated June 1985 by First
Comics (below)
IPC profile
 |
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Spring 1985
Journal of the Association of Teachers of Maths |
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Amstrad
Action first issue - a keyboard is reflected in the monster's
eye
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Amstrad Action
[closed] Back
to top
October 1985. Future, Somerton, Somerset. £1;
100pp. Ed: Peter Connor. Pub: Chris Anderson
Aimed at Amstrad CPC games market. Chris Anderson had been editor
of Personal Computer Games and Zzap! 64 in London.
He moved to Somerton and founded Future with Amstrad Action.
The magazine focused on games reviews and playing them rather than
typing in.listings, which was a core element of the user magazines.
The top of the front cover reads: 'Power-packed reviews each month
on the amazing CPC 464 and 664.' To the left of the vertical masthead
is another selling line: 'The mouldbreaking magazine from Future
Publishing.' The editorial describes how the title was written on
Amstrads and sent by modem to the typesetters, who returned typeset
copy for the editors to paste up. Anderson was known as 'Ayatullah'
by the staff and named newspaper tycoons Robert Maxwell and Rupert
Murdoch as his heroes.
Future profile |
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Computer
Images - launch issue above and as a quarterly a year
later below
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Computer
Images [closed] Back
to top
October 1985. Emap McLaren, Croydon. £3.
56pp.
Ed: Bob Swain. Pub: Michael J. Eades
Supplement sent to readers of Audio Visual and Television
and Video Production. By October a year later it was a quarterly.
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Your
Sinclair: issue 5 from May 1986
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Your Sinclair
[closed] Back
to top
Dennis/Future. January 1986-?
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Wheels
for the Mind: a magazine produced on Apple kit in spring
1990
Wheels
for the Mind: relaunched in September 1990
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Wheels
for the Mind [closed] To
top
Apple Computer UK/King's College London. 1986-?
The advent of the Apple Macintosh and Pagemaker software made desktop
typesetting and design possible. Wheels was published by
Apple for members of the Apple University Consortium. The editor
was David Riddle at King's College London and it was produced by
Robert Smyth at QMW University of London. In 1990, Apple brought
in specialist publishing expertise in the form of project manager
Linda Dhondy, who relaunched the title with a design by Sian Lewis,
who had designed Apple Business. |
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|
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Putting Your Amstrad
to Work
[closed] Back
to top
September/October 1986. Focus Investments
Aimed at users of Amstrad wordprocessing systems with bundled printer |
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Electronic Publishing
Now [closed] Back
to top
April 1987
Aimed at booming Macintosh-based DTP market. Editor Bruce Smith
(ex-Acorn User deputy) |
| 
Educational
Computing was born out of a merger of Redwood's School
Computer User and Emap's Educational Computing
tabloid newspaper
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Educational
Computing [closed] Back
to top
Redwood/BBC/ITT. Controlled circulation/subscription.October 1987-2004?
Acorn User had a big readership in schools that it wanted
to build on and schools were crying out for advice on using the
computers were being given. The problem, for a new, small, publisher
was the cost of distribution. So Acorn User's
editor, Tony Quinn and publisher, Simon Goode, approached computer
educational adviser Mike Bostock for guidance on a deal with local
education authorities: they would take free magazines in bulk and
distribute them to schools. Redwood
would make its money from advertising. Over 90% of the UK's LEAs
signed up for the deal. It was a unique idea and from it a quarterly
called School Computer User was launched. At about the
same time, Emap had decided to close its subscription-based monthly
tabloid format Educational Computing (the publisher of
which was Tom Moloney, who became chief executive of Emap in 2005).
This had been running for several years and had a subscription base
of almost 10,000 copies, so Redwood bought the title. Redwood combined
School Computer User's distribution model and editorial
strategy with the name Educational Computing. The magazine's
name was later expanded to Educational Computing and Technology
and it was sold to In 1993, Redwood sold Educational Computing
to Training Information Network ITT Publications. |
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Commodore
User [closed] To
top
Emap. August 1988-? |
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3D
World in March 2003 had just taken over CGI magazine
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Future |
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