Australian Personal Computer
Melbourne's general micro monthly, and a claim this library contradicts
APC launched in May 1980 from Carlton, Victoria, with 'AUSTRALIA'S FIRST MICRO MAGAZINE' on the cover — five months after MICRO-80 began publishing in South Australia. Its contributors, columns and cover artist are British, and match a British magazine's, but this library holds nothing from that title early enough to test the connection.
Australian Personal Computer launched in May 1980, published by Australian Microcomputer Journal of Carlton, Victoria, at $2.20. Its run in this library reaches into the 2000s.
The cover claim, and what this library holds
Issue one carries the line “AUSTRALIA’S FIRST MICRO MAGAZINE” across the top of the cover.
This library holds MICRO-80, published monthly from Goodwood, South Australia, from December 1979 — five months earlier.
The two claims are not quite in direct collision. MICRO-80 describes itself more narrowly, as “the first and only Australian monthly magazine devoted entirely to the TRS-80 microcomputer”, and a general-interest magazine might reasonably not count a single-machine one as its predecessor. But MICRO-80 was an Australian magazine about microcomputers, monthly, and it came first.
Recorded as a cover line tested against the holdings, not as a resolved dispute.
An unmistakably British issue one
The first issue is assembled from British contributors and British column furniture:
- Benchtest — “the first of our structured investigations into micro hardware”, by Sue Eisenbach, testing the Compucolor II
- Newsprint — “APC inaugurates a column of micro happenings”
- Computer Answers — Sheridan Williams on readers’ software problems
- Artificial Intelligence Without Tears — a David Levy series on game theory
- Cover illustration by Ingram Pinn
The content is genuinely local — the Benchtest subject is an Australian-market machine, the advertising is from Melbourne dealers — but the format and the by-lines are not.
⚠ An open question this library cannot settle. Those names and column titles belong to the British magazine Personal Computer World, and the pattern resembles the licensed editions this Vault has documented elsewhere. But nothing in APC’s own pages states a relationship, and the only issues of Personal Computer World held here are from 2005 — twenty-five years too late to compare by-lines, columns or artwork. The resemblance is recorded; the relationship is not established, and would need contemporary British issues to test.
See also
- MICRO-80 — the earlier Australian title
- Magazines across borders — the shapes this may or may not be one of