In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the trajectory of the Commodore 8-bit computers it covered.
A throwback to the PET Gazette
Compute! started as a monthly newsletter in April 1978 covering the Commodore PET computer. Its original name was the PET Gazette. PET Gazette proved to be very popular, and too much work for its founder, Len Lindsay, to handle on his own. After switching to a less-demanding quarterly schedule, he ended up selling the PET Gazette after the summer 1979 issue to a company called Small System Services. Small System Services decided to expand it into a more general purpose magazine, initially covering all 6502-based computers, which included Commodore, Apple, Atari, and some kit computers. Later the kit computers were dropped in favor of the TI-99/4A and IBM PC.
Starting a general purpose computer magazine in 1979 may not seem in retrospect like the best idea. It was already a pretty crowded market. Compute! distinguished itself by publishing very ambitious type-in programs. I always thought its editorial content was a step below magazines like Creative Computing or Byte. It’s not that the articles were bad, but the type-in programs outshone the articles. And it wouldn’t surprise me if some people didn’t read the articles.
Gazette and other specialty offshoot magazines
In May 1983, ABC Publishing acquired Compute! for $18 million. Later that year, ABC started launching specialized magazines under the Compute! name to cover Commodore, Apple II, the IBM PC, and later, the Atari ST and Amiga. They followed essentially the same formula, but if you bought one of the specialized magazines, you didn’t have to worry about the most interesting type-in program from that month not running on the particular computer you owned. Compute!’s magazine for Commodores was called Compute!’s Gazette, a throwback to the PET Gazette name.
Gazette proved popular because of Commodore’s large installed base. As late as 1985, Commodore had 38 percent of the home and personal computer market all to itself and had sold approximately 8 to 9 million computers worldwide. It was a North American publication, but the Commodore VIC-20, 64, and 128 had all sold well in the United States and Canada.
Gazette competed with a number of other Commodore-specific magazines, including RUN and Ahoy. Gazette continued its parent magazine’s tradition of publishing ambitious type-in programs. Not every issue contained a piece of software that rivaled commercial software. But once or twice a year they did.
Gazette‘s type-ins
Each issue contained several type-in programs, some written by Compute! staff, but many submitted by readers. The programs ran the gamut from utilities to programming aids to productivity software and, of course, games. The most prolific author in Gazette’s early days was Charles Brannon, whose contributions included a character set editor called Ultrafont+, a sprite editor called Sprite Magic, and Speedscript, a word processor for the VIC-20 and C-64, ended up being ported to the Commodore 128 and other platforms as well. Written entirely in 6502 assembly language, it didn’t have all the features of all the commercial word processors for the C-64, but it had all of the essentials. At 6 kilobytes in length, it packed an impressive feature set into a small space. Typing it in meant typing more than 6,000 hexadecimal characters properly.
The August 1997 issue contained a program called 80-column sector editor, a disk sector editor by a familiar name, Matthew Desmond. Desmond went on to write Desterm, a popular terminal program for the Commodore 128, and Destest, a cartridge for diagnosing dead C-64s.
The more ambitious programs like Speedscript took a long time to type in, so they started offering a disk subscription, containing all of the programs from the month’s magazine, sometimes with some bonus content. Rhett Anderson, the former associate editor of Gazette, said in 2019:
When I was at COMPUTE! we were at one time the largest buyer of 5 1/4″ floppy disks in the world, and suppliers courted us aggressively. This was due to the incredible popularity of the [monthly] COMPUTE! disks and especially the COMPUTE!’s Gazette disk.
I think that as we published more and more assembly language programs, fewer and fewer people wanted to type in the programs. After all, you’d learn a lot typing in BASIC programs, but I don’t think anyone learned anything typing in MLX-formatted programs.
I speak only for myself, but I typed in more than one of those MLX-formatted programs. The best was a game called Crossroads. But I did tire of typing in really long programs in that format. A year later when they published a sequel, I bought the disk.
Sale to General Media in 1990
But as interest in 8-bit computers waned toward the end of the decade, Compute‘s fortunes sunk along with it it. Compute‘s owner, Capital Cities/ABC, decided to divest of its computer publications. In May 1990 they sold Compute! to General Media. One of General Media’s publications, Omni, billed itself as covering science fact and fiction, but it was also heavy on conspiracy. Omni would have fit in alongside Wayne Green‘s magazines after he gave up on computer magazines, but it was a bit odd as a sister publication for Compute. Everything else they published, well, that’s a story for someone else to tell.
General Media’s approach to Compute when they relaunched it with the October 1990 issue was to consolidate everything back into a single magazine, but with a twist. The main magazine consisted of general interest computing and PC coverage. In the center of the magazine, they included a supplement, around 40 pages long, dedicated to another platform, either the C-64/128 or Amiga. When you subscribed, you selected which additional platform you wanted.
The Gazette edition of Compute survived until December 1993, when the content moved to digital distribution on floppy disk. Fourteen issues of this exist, issued between January 1994 and February 1995.
I am personally attached to it, because my first paid publication happened in Compute, specifically in the October 1991 issue of the Gazette edition. But even though General Media-era Compute paid me money and put my name in print, I think Compute! was better in its Capital Cities/ABC days.
The final print issue of Compute was September 1994, issue number 168. After that issue, General Media pulled the plug and sold Compute to Ziff Davis, who discontinued it. When Ziff Davis purchased Compute, they offered former Compute subscribers a choice of several Ziff Davis magazines to fill out their subscription. Computer Shopper and PC Magazine were not among the choices they offered. I selected PC Computing.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.