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Amstrad Semanal

Hobby Press's weekly for Spain's Amstrad boom, 1985–1987

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Hobby Press launched Amstrad Semanal in Madrid on 3 September 1985, a weekly for the computer it called the boom of the year, modelled on its Spectrum weekly Microhobby. It ran for a hundred issues and nearly 4,000 pages, paid readers up to 100,000 pesetas for their programs, and in September 1987 turned monthly as Amstrad Personal, to cover Amstrad's PCW and PC as well as the CPC.

Amstrad Semanal (Amstrad Weekly) was a bet on two things at once: that Spain’s Amstrad owners wanted a magazine of their own, and that they wanted it every week. Its publisher, Hobby Press of Madrid, had made the second bet once already. Its first editorial recalled the launch of the Spectrum weekly Microhobby almost a year earlier, a periodicity “never seen before in a technical publication”, and the voices that had predicted Microhobby would not last three months. “Today,” it went on, “in putting into circulation this Microhobby Amstrad, also weekly, we know that the formula works.”

Fast facts

  • Published: weekly, Tuesday to Tuesday, from 3 September 1985 (Año 1, Número 1, 3 al 10 de septiembre) to issue 99 in August 1987, with fortnightly gaps in high summer; issue 100 covered the whole of September 1987.
  • Publisher: Hobby Press, S.A., Alcobendas, Madrid. Editorial director José I. Gómez-Centurión; executive director Víctor Prieto; deputy director José María Díaz; editor-in-chief Marta García.
  • Price: 150 pesetas for issue 1; 160 pesetas including VAT by August 1986; 350 pesetas for the final monthly-sized issue 100.
  • Also known as: Microhobby Amstrad, the name its editorial and its back-issue offers used.
  • Rights: Spanish rights to the British magazine Computing with the Amstrad.
  • Successor: Amstrad Personal, monthly, from October 1987.

“Nace una Amstrella”

The launch slogan was Nace una «Amstrella», a star is born. The first editorial called the Amstrad “the boom of 1985”: not yet the best-selling computer in Spain, but growing fast on a price-to-performance ratio it described as overwhelming. It also warned that recent increases in customs duties, which hit every imported computer and spared only some made in Spain, could cloud the machine’s immediate future, and promised to say more about them.

The cover of issue 1 led on three things: machine code taught bit a bit, an assessment of the new CPC 664 (“¿Qué aporta el nuevo Amstrad?”, what does the new Amstrad bring?), and a review of Ultimate’s Knight Lore, “el programa nº 1 en el mundo”. The review, ten months after the game’s British release on the Spectrum, said Knight Lore had marked the frontier between old software and “the second generation”, and that its fame made it the number one computer program in the world. It also explained what the Amstrad gained: the CPC version used screen mode 1, with a finer picture than the Spectrum’s and four colours to a screen instead of two. An advertisement in the same issue sold the game at 1,875 pesetas.

The advertising shows a market supplied second. ERBE Software sold Gremlins on being “íntegramente en castellano”, entirely in Spanish, and pitched Beach Head as “por fin para tu Amstrad”, at last for your Amstrad, the game that had been most popular on the Commodore and the Spectrum. A CPC 664 cost 109,500 pesetas with a green screen and 134,500 with a colour monitor.

Reader programs, paid in pesetas

Like most magazines of its time, Amstrad Semanal printed readers’ programs, and it paid for them well. Under the heading “Gana 100.000 pesetas con Microhobby Amstrad”, the first issue asked for programs on unprotected cassette, so that a listing could be printed, with a description and a table of subroutines and variables. A published program earned its author between 15,000 and 100,000 pesetas “en concepto de derechos de autor”, as author’s rights. Everything sent in stayed with the magazine. The listings were then sold again on cassette: by August 1986 Hobby Press offered tapes holding every program published in issues 21 to 40.

From weekly to monthly

The weekly grew fatter. From issue 65, in December 1986, it added many more pages, and by issue 100 the editors counted “100 números, casi 4.000 páginas” (a hundred issues, almost 4,000 pages) on the whole Amstrad range. By then Amstrad itself had changed: the editorial saw the company “decantarse hacia los ordenadores personales”, leaning towards personal computers, without dropping any of its products, and wanted every reader to find something “tenga el ordenador que tenga: CPC, PCW o PC”, whichever computer they had. The answer, it decided, was more pages less often. Issue 100, dated 1 to 30 September 1987, announced that the magazine would increase its pages and become monthly, as Amstrad Personal, the “favourite son and successor” of Amstrad Semanal, on sale at the start of October.

Sources

  • Amstrad Semanal issue 1, 3–10 September 1985: cover; masthead (staff, Hobby Press, Alcobendas, price, Computing with the Amstrad); editorial (“Microhobby Semanal”, “Microhobby Amstrad”, “Nace una Amstrella”, customs duties); Knight Lore review; ERBE advertisement (Gremlins, Beach Head); CPC 664 prices; Knight Lore price list; “Gana 100.000 pesetas con Microhobby Amstrad” (program submissions and payments); subscription card for “la revista semanal Microhobby AMSTRAD”.
  • Amstrad Semanal issue 19, 7–13 January 1986: masthead (“Año II · Número 19”).
  • Amstrad Semanal issues 49 to 51 (5 August, 19 August and 2 September 1986): the summer gap; issue 50, masthead (160 ptas. including VAT) and back-issue offer of issues and program cassettes 21–40 “de Microhobby Amstrad”.
  • Amstrad Semanal issue 100, 1–30 September 1987: masthead (350 ptas.); editorial (100 issues, almost 4,000 pages, more pages from issue 65, the move to monthly publication and Amstrad Personal).
  • CRASH issue 12, January 1985, p. 8: the first copies of Knight Lore arriving in November 1984 (for the British release date).
  • “MicroHobby”, Spanish Wikipedia (web, secondary): Microhobby published by Hobby Press from November 1984, weekly in its first period. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroHobby

See also

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