Club Commodore
A Barcelona distributor's bulletin, greeting its readers in four languages
Club Commodore was a bulletin for VIC-20 and CBM users published in Spain from 1982 by Microelectrónica y Control, Commodore's exclusive Spanish distributor. It is the earliest club magazine in this library, its content is technical rather than promotional, and its December 1982 issue wishes readers a happy new year in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician.
Club Commodore was a bulletin for VIC-20 and CBM users, published in Spain from 1982 by Microelectrónica y Control, S.A. of Barcelona and Madrid. Six issues are held here, from December 1982 to July 1983, of sixteen to twenty pages each.
It is among the earliest club magazines in this library, two months ahead of Atari Club Magazin and seven years ahead of Club Nintendo — but not the earliest. Milan’s Commodore Computer Club began in September 1982.
The issues held here are numbered 3, 5 and 6 for December 1982, February and March 1983, which makes it monthly and places its own first issue in October 1982 — a month behind the Italian one.
A third kind of house organ
The publisher is named in the bulletin’s own advertising: “Distribuidor exclusivo para España: Microelectrónica y Control, S.A.” — Commodore’s exclusive Spanish distributor, not Commodore.
That makes a third arrangement inside the category this Vault calls a manufacturer’s house organ, and the three are worth keeping apart:
| Published by | Made | |
|---|---|---|
| Club Nintendo | Nintendo’s own European subsidiary | centrally, localised outward |
| Atari Club Magazin | Atari’s German operation | locally |
| Club Commodore | an independent national distributor | locally |
The third is the loosest tie to the manufacturer, and it shows in what the bulletin contains.
Technical, not promotional
The contents of the December 1982 issue are not what a marketing department produces:
- the VIC-20 memory map
- a character editor for the VIC
- a program to encipher and decipher messages
- home automation with the VIC-20
- common-emitter stage calculations
- getting the VIC-20 started on RTTY for radio amateurs
The cipher article introduces itself as “algo exótico y poco habitual en las revistas serias de informática” — something exotic and unusual in serious computing magazines — and the listing’s own REM header credits Microelectrónica y Control, Barcelona, 14 September 1982. The distributor’s staff were writing the programs.
The editorial voice is engineers’. Announcing an increase to sixteen pages, it describes the jump as “exactamente el doble (+3 dB)” — a decibel joke about page count, three decibels being a doubling.
Four languages
The December issue closes its editorial with new year wishes, and does it four times:
¡FELICES FIESTAS Y PRÓSPERO AÑO NUEVO! · BON NADAL I FELIÇ 1983! · ZORIONAK ETA URTE BERRI ON · ¡BOAS FESTAS!
Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician — Spain’s four language communities, addressed in a computer bulletin in December 1982, seven years after the end of a regime under which the other three had been suppressed in public life. The same editorial quotes a Catalan saying, introduced as “como decimos en Cataluña”.
⚠ Nothing in the bulletin comments on any of that, and this entry does not either beyond noting the date. It is recorded because it is on the page and because no British or American publication in this library does anything comparable.
See also
- VIC-20, Commodore
- Club Nintendo, Atari Club Magazin — the other two house-organ arrangements
- Magazines across borders
- Amstrad Semanal — the other Spanish title here