Bajtek

Bajtek was a Polish computer monthly, first published in September 1985 at 60 złotych. This library holds 115 issues to December 1995, fifty of them from before 1990.

Its masthead slogan is Z mikrokomputerem na ty — roughly, on first-name terms with the microcomputer. Its title is explained on the first page: BAJT — to 8 bitów, podstawowych jednostek informacji.

Published by the state, to a purpose

The editorial states what the magazine is, and it is not a commercial venture:

“BAJTEK jest wspólnym, miesięcznym dodatkiem do «Sztandaru Młodych» i «Odrodzenia».”

A joint monthly supplement to Sztandar Młodych — the newspaper of the official socialist youth organisation — and to the weekly Odrodzenie. The same page places it beside a national campaign, the PRON Narodowy Czyn Pomocy Szkole, a drive to equip schools.

And it states an aim:

“Ambicją zespołu redakcyjnego jest… zwalczanie analfabetyzmu mikrokomputerowego w Polsce.”

The editorial team’s ambition is to combat microcomputer illiteracy in Poland.

Nothing else in this Vault reads like that. British magazines of 1985 sold themselves on reviews, cover tapes and being first with the news; Pixel in Greece was created because a reader survey asked for listings; MC-microcomputer was a commercial monthly from a Rome publisher. Bajtek is a literacy programme attached to a youth newspaper.

What a state literacy programme printed

Issue one is not propaganda. Its cover promises Professor Władysław M. Turski, the ZX Spectrum, LOGO, software protection, a piece on the joystick, a survey of microcomputers around the world — and Atic Atac, a British game from Ultimate.

A magazine published under the auspices of the official youth press, in 1985, reviewing a Spectrum game from Ashby-de-la-Zouch. The survey of what Polish readers were reading about bears it out: across Bajtek’s pages the Spectrum is the most-named machine by a wide margin, ahead of the Amstrad, the PC and the C64.

Three prices for the same machine

The most useful thing Bajtek printed was a price column, and its column headings are the whole argument of this Vault’s geographic comparison in one line. The February 1989 table is headed CENY NA DZIEŃ 15.02.1989 — prices as at 15 February 1989 — over three columns:

GIEŁDA „BAJTKA“	PEWEX / BALTONA	RFN
tys. zł	USD	DM

The magazine’s own survey of the giełda, the open market, in thousands of złoty. The Pewex and Baltona hard-currency state shops, in dollars. And RFN — the Federal Republic of Germany — in Deutschmarks.

A British magazine printed one price because there was one way to buy a computer. Bajtek printed three because there were three, in three currencies, and which one applied to you depended on what money you had access to.

The figures for that week run roughly: a ZX Spectrum 48K at 390 on the market against 90–190 DM in West Germany; a Spectrum +3 at 850 against 280–400 DM; a Timex 2048 at 370; a C-64C at 650.

⚠ The page is column-interleaved in this scan — the price table sits beside a readers’ contact column — so the alignment of figures to headings is legible but not certain, and the ranges are recorded here as read rather than as verified.

⚠ Readers’ names, ages and postal addresses appear in the adjacent column and are not reproduced. One correspondent writes from Prague, which is worth noting only because it shows the readership crossed borders the machines did.

Where machines actually came from

The vocabulary bears the column headings out across the run. Giełda appears in 100 of the 115 issues held, dolar in 105, komis — the commission shop — in 60, Pewex in 56 and Baltona in 34. Przemyt, smuggling, appears in four.

An October 1985 piece asks how long the Jarmark will remain “Mekką amatorów małej informatyki”, the Mecca of small-computing enthusiasts, and whether it can withstand competition from Pewex. A 1986 interviewee describes buying English-language books “na giełdach, od różnych osób” — at the markets, from various people — and paying five thousand złoty for a photocopied 250-page manual.

That is the acquisition machinery of a market with no retail channel, described by the magazine that served it.

⚠ This entry is built from issue 1, from the price column, and from measurements across the run. This library holds Bajtek in quantity and no secondary account of it, so nothing here describes how it changed across eleven years, who wrote it, or how it fared after 1989 — the run held continues to 1995, well past the state that launched it.

See also

• The C64 across borders
• 576 KByte — Hungary, five years later and after the transition
• Računari — Yugoslavia, a different socialism
• Atic Atac