Bajtek | Code Like It's 198x

Bajtek was the Polish computer magazine of the 1980s: a monthly that began in September 1985 as a supplement to a state youth newspaper and, within four months, was printing 200,000 copies. Its first editorial set out its aim in a single phrase, zwalczanie analfabetyzmu mikrokomputerowego w Polsce: to fight microcomputer illiteracy in Poland. Over eleven years it taught BASIC and LOGO, reviewed British games, printed the prices of computers on the open markets beside their prices in West Germany, and lent its name to one of Warsaw’s computer markets. When the state publishing monopoly was dissolved in 1990, its staff formed a cooperative and kept the magazine going for another six years.

Its masthead slogan was Z mikrokomputerem na ty, roughly “on first-name terms with the microcomputer”. The name is explained on the first page: BAJT — to 8 bitów, podstawowych jednostek informacji, a byte is eight bits, the basic units of information. Bajtek is its diminutive: “little byte”.

A supplement to the youth press

The first issue, dated September 1985, cost 60 złotych. Its editorial described the magazine as a joint monthly supplement to the youth daily Sztandar Młodych and to Odrodzenie, and its masthead named a deputy editor from each paper, Waldemar Siwiński of Sztandar Młodych and Zbigniew Siedlecki of Odrodzenie. The publisher was the state press concern RSW “Prasa-Książka-Ruch”. The editorial tied the magazine to a national drive for computer education in schools, Narodowy Czyn Pomocy Szkole, launched by the national council of PRON, the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth.

The editors were frank about what they could manage. Magazines of this kind elsewhere, they wrote, came with colour, good paper, cassettes and diskettes. “Envy takes hold,” they added, when you pick up the magazines offered to young Bulgarians. They started anyway, “because the loss of every day in this field is a loss that cannot be made good”.

Issue one mixed the serious and the popular. It opened with an interview with Professor Władysław M. Turski, a computer scientist at the universities of Warsaw and London and president of the Polish Information Processing Society, who repeated the warning of his book Nie samą informatyką that neglecting computing risked Poland’s “civilisational and intellectual colonisation”. It also carried a piece on joysticks, one on software protection, a guide to the ZX Spectrum and a two-page feature on Atic Atac by Ultimate, with a plan of the castle on the following page. The game, Bajtek noted, was a hit of 1983 and “very widespread in our country”. In 1989 the magazine still called the ZX Spectrum pierwszy najbardziej popularny komputer domowy w Polsce, the first and most popular home computer in Poland.

Growing up

The first issue printed 50,000 copies, and Siwiński wrote in January 1986 that it was not nearly enough: more than 1,500 letters arrived in the first ten days asking where to find it. The January 1986 issue, the first “big” Bajtek, printed 200,000 copies, now as a monthly supplement to Sztandar Młodych alone, at 100 złotych. The same editorial announced that Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the 31-year-old government minister for youth affairs and later President of Poland, had promised a personal computer to the first baby named Bajtek.

The print run rose to 250,000 in the summer of 1986 and stayed there through 1987. The masthead listed a council chaired by Jerzy Domański, editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych, and a small team led by Siwiński. By 1989 the magazine was organised into klany, clans, one for each family of machines, each with its own editor: Atari, Amstrad, Commodore and Spectrum.

Władysław Majewski told his own version of the founding in the same January 1986 issue. He had proposed a magazine for computer fans in 1983 to a neighbour who ran a publishing house in the RSW press concern, and was asked “who’s going to buy it?” A year later the idea came back. In the spring of 1985 a publishing director, Maciej Hoffman, took it to Sztandar Młodych, and when some doubted the name, Majewski wrote, it was Turski who settled it.

Prices at the giełda

Bajtek’s pages name the routes by which a home computer reached a Polish buyer: the Pewex and Baltona chains that sold Western goods for hard currency, the commission shops, and the giełdy, weekend markets where people bought and sold hardware and copied software. In its second issue, in October 1985, Roman Poznański toured the computer stalls at Warsaw’s Jarmark Perski market. A new 48K ZX Spectrum cost about 90,000 złotych and a Commodore 64 with its cassette deck up to 185,000; programs cost 100 to 500 złotych, recorded on request onto the buyer’s own tape recorder. How long, he asked, would the Jarmark remain “the Mecca of small-computing enthusiasts”? Bajtek promised to report the market’s prices in every issue.

It kept that promise with a price table whose columns told readers where a computer could be bought and in what money. In October 1986 the columns were Giełda Bajtka and the commission shops, in thousands of złotych, beside average prices in Austria, France, West Germany and Britain. A Commodore 64 cost 150,000 to 165,000 złotych at the market, 370 to 449 Deutschmarks in West Germany and £90 to £110 in Britain. By February 1989 the columns were the market in złotych, Pewex and Baltona in dollars, and West Germany in marks. A 48K Spectrum cost 350,000 złotych at the market against 90 to 150 marks in West Germany; a Commodore 128 cost 850,000 złotych, $299 at Pewex, or 399 to 500 marks.

Readers’ own accounts filled in the rest. Adam Krauze, an 18-year-old Warsaw secondary-school pupil interviewed in January 1986, had bought English-language books “at the markets, from various people”, and paid 5,000 złotych for a photocopied 250-page manual.

The Giełda Bajtka ultimatum

The market that carried the magazine’s name met every Saturday and Sunday in a Warsaw school on the corner of Grzybowska and Marchlewskiego streets. In October 1989 Marcin Przasnyski reported on a day there. Dealers with reserved tables arrived by car and taxi with piles of equipment; when the doors opened the crowd ran for the free spaces upstairs. Children read out game titles from Bajtek and a dealer copied them onto tape. PC programs cost a flat 3,000 złotych a disk. Deals over about 100,000 złotych were done in dollars. There was, Przasnyski noted, no law in Poland protecting the copyright of programs.

The editors explained that the name Giełda Bajtka dated from a proposal they had made with other organisations to set up the market, and that they took no money from it. They then gave its organisers two months to end trading in foreign currency, cut back table reservations, open a free advice corner for buyers, stop the sale of photocopied Western publications, and charge lower fees to people selling programs they had written themselves. If not, Bajtek would withdraw its patronage and the right to use its name.

The cooperative

The end of communist rule in 1989 also ended the state press concern. In the double issue 5–6 of 1990, the editors told readers that Bajtek had had “something like a heart attack”. Paper, printing and distribution had all become dearer, and RSW, now being wound up, had failed to publish the magazine on time. Under the law liquidating RSW, almost everyone on the staff had joined a new cooperative, Spółdzielnia “Bajtek”, which had leased the title until its ownership was settled. That issue was the first the cooperative published. The cooperative also held the rights to two other titles, Moje Atari and the games magazine Top Secret. “Trust us,” the subscription notice said: “owners work better!”

The same issue opened a new clan for the IBM PC. From 1991 the editor-in-chief was Jarosław Młodzki, and by 1993 the eight-bit machines shared a single section, 8 bitów. In 1994 the publisher became Wydawnictwo Bajtek, and the masthead called it a Magazyn Komputerowy, a computer magazine. Wojciech Jabłoński became editor in the summer of 1994 and Tomasz Grochowski in the spring of 1995. The print run fell as the eight-bit readership moved on, from 105,000 in 1990 to 96,000 in 1992, 81,000 in 1993 and about 55,000 from the autumn of 1994.

The last regular issue, a double numbered 133–134, was dated September–October 1996. The Polish press encyclopaedia Zapach Papieru attributes the closure to rising paper and printing costs and to the collapse of Agrobank, where the cooperative kept its savings; the cooperative’s subscription notices of 1990 give its account at Agrobank. A special issue numbered 135 was published in June 2016 for the Pixel Heaven retro event in Warsaw.

Sources

Bajtek no. 1, September 1985: cover, editorial and masthead (joint supplement, the national campaign, microcomputer illiteracy, the Bulgarian magazines, Siwiński and Siedlecki, the publisher, 60 zł); interview with Władysław M. Turski; Atic Atac feature, p. 17.
Bajtek no. 2, October 1985, pp. 24–25: Roman Poznański on the computer stalls at the Jarmark Perski (prices “dotyczą pierwszej połowy września”).
Bajtek no. 1, January 1986: Waldemar Siwiński’s editorial (the trial issue of 50,000 copies, 1,500 letters, 200,000 copies, Aleksander Kwaśniewski’s promise), masthead (Jerzy Domański, 100 zł); interview with Adam Krauze; Władysław Majewski, “Jak wymyśliłem Bajtka”, p. 28.
Bajtek 8/86, 9/86 and 12/87: masthead print runs of 250,000 copies. Bajtek 12/86: price table “Giełda (ceny na dzień 15.X.1986 r.)”.
Bajtek 1/89 and 1/90: mastheads with Domański, Siwiński and the clan editors.
Bajtek 3/89, p. 28: price table “Ceny na dzień 15.02.1989”.
Bajtek 10/89, pp. 3–5: Marcin Przasnyski’s report on the Giełda Bajtka and the editors’ ultimatum; the ZX Spectrum described as “pierwszy najbardziej popularny komputer domowy w Polsce”.
Bajtek 5–6/90, p. 2: editorial on RSW’s liquidation and Spółdzielnia “Bajtek”; subscription notice and masthead (105,000 copies).
Bajtek mastheads 1991–1995: Jarosław Młodzki (from 1991), Wojciech Jabłoński (from 8/94), Tomasz Grochowski (from 4/95); Wydawnictwo Bajtek (from 1/94); print runs of 107,000 (2/91), 96,000 (6/92), 81,000 (7/93) and 55,000 (9/94 to 12/95).
“Bajtek”, Polish Wikipedia (web, secondary): the publishers by period, the last issue of September 1996 and the special issue of June 2016. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajtek
“Bajtek”, Zapach Papieru encyclopaedia of Polish magazines (web, secondary): the final issue 133–134, the reasons for closure, and the 2016 special issue at Pixel Heaven. https://zapach-papieru.pl/encyklopedia-pism/bajtek/
“Aleksander Kwaśniewski”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): President of Poland, 1995–2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Kwa%C5%9Bniewski