Last Updated on December 27, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
It was 41 years ago this month, in January 1984, that RUN magazine made its debut. With RUN, Wayne Green applied the formula he used for 80 Micro to the hot-selling Commodore 8-bit home computers. While it was no longer an original idea, RUN arguably was even more successful than 80 Micro had been.
Immediate success
The Commodore 64 and VIC-20 already had millions of owners in January 1984, with the VIC-20 becoming the first million-selling computer in 1982, and the C-64 joining it in 1983. RUN quickly reached a circulation of 200,000-300,000 and held it for several years until demand for Commodore 8-bits slowed down. Folio rated it the second-fastest growing U.S. magazine of 1985. The 80 Micro formula worked just as well for Commodore owners as it had for TRS 80 owners.
The mix of content in RUN
RUN contained a good mix of editorial content, ranging from articles about using available commercial programs for Commodore systems to type-in programs and highly technical content teaching you how to program the systems, including a regularly recurring column called Magic containing programming tips and short programs, never more than 25 lines long. It also had regularly recurring columns on telecommunications and repairing and troubleshooting your machine. Every issue also had a large number of reviews of commercial software and new hardware, and the reviews didn’t pull punches. RUN wouldn’t give a bad product a good review.
And in an early issue, regular contributor Jim Strasma lamented the state of the game industry, saying that the message of far too many computer games is that strangers are for shooting, and without naming M.U.L.E. by name, seeming to wish for more games like M.U.L.E.
Whether you were trying to run your business on a Commodore, playing games, or wanting to program it, RUN had something for you in each issue. I think Compute! had better type-ins overall, but RUN was the better all-around magazine.
Spinoffs of RUN
RUN resulted in one spin-off as well. Commodore followed up the original VIC-20, 64, and 128 with something completely different: the Amiga. Other than being made by the same company, it didn’t really have anything in common with the computers that RUN covered.
So in 1985, the editors of RUN launched a new magazine, Amiga World, to cover it. Amiga World was also successful, lasting until 1995.
End of the line: 1992
RUN met its demise after after Commodore shifted its focus to its Amiga line. In 1990, RUN switched to bimonthly due to decreasing demand. But by the end of 1992, the C-64 and 128’s audience was dwindling. RUN abruptly ended its run with the November/December 1992 issue, its 94th overall. The issue gave plenty of hints that it intended to carry on, including publishing the results of a reader survey about its future. The decision to end must have been made after that issue went to press. But it had a good, ahem, run.
Reading RUN today
Issues of RUN remain a useful snapshot in time of what it was like to own a Commodore in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The magazines are technically still under copyright, but high-quality scans exist online, both at archive.org and elsewhere.
Criticism of Green and his magazines
The 1988 biography of Wayne Green, titled Run, Wayne, Run, paints 80 Micro and the rest of Green’s computer magazines in a negative light, calling all of them failures. But the author had an axe to grind with Green, being married to Green’s ex-wife, and arguably had a conflict of interest. The book talked up Green’s failures and downplayed any success Green ever had, including RUN.
Putting your feelings about Wayne Green the person aside, RUN was a good magazine and its formula worked well. Green and Computerworld replicated the idea several times throughout the decade, as new computer models launched. As long as the computer they were covering fared well in the marketplace, the magazines did very well too.
I do think Green’s magazines worked best when he created them and then largely stepped out of the way. He was better at creating magazines than he was at running them. But the eight-year run of RUN was a much-needed resource for Commodore computer owners at the time, and remains an invaluable historical record for these storied machines.
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.
do you prefer the Commodore 64, or Tandy COCO 3 512k?
512k > 64k
The 64, hands down. It’s what I grew up with. The 64 had much stronger graphics and sound, but a weaker CPU. The Coco had a great CPU that could do almost Unix-like things. If I’d been in college and studying computer science in the mid 80s, wanting to run sophisticated operating systems and compilers for different languages, I would have preferred the Coco, hands down. But I was a pre-teen who wanted to be able to play some cool video games in addition to learning computing, and the 64 had a huge selection of games available.