Club Commodore | Code Like It's 198x

Club Commodore was the bulletin that Commodore’s Spanish distributor sent to owners of the VIC-20 and of Commodore’s CBM business machines from late 1982. The publisher was not Commodore but Microelectrónica y Control, S.A. of Barcelona, whose advertisements in the bulletin describe it as “Distribuidor exclusivo para España” (exclusive distributor for Spain). You might expect a distributor’s newsletter to be a catalogue. This one was written largely by the distributor’s own technical staff: it printed memory maps, electronics calculations, a program for sending secret messages and instructions for turning a VIC-20 into a radio-teletype terminal, and blamed its misprints on a cartoon mascot called BUG.

A distributor’s bulletin

The masthead calls it a “Boletín informativo para los usuarios de microordenadores VIC y CBM”, an information bulletin for users of VIC and CBM microcomputers. Letters went to the company’s Barcelona office at Taquígrafo Serra 7, and some editorials were signed by the company’s publicity department, the “Departamento de Difusión”. In February 1983 that department claimed “más de 4.000 instalaciones en España” (more than 4,000 installations in Spain) and used the editorial to promote folders of business software for Commodore’s larger machines.

The company’s staff wrote much of the rest. Pere Masats, who took the photographs of the company’s stand at the SIMO computer show in Madrid in November 1982, wrote the cipher program, a series on the VIC-20’s memory map and an article on Murphy’s law. M. Amado of Microelectrónica y Control supplied Murphy’s corollaries and, from July 1983, a series on Commodore’s disk drives. Other names appear alongside theirs: Joan Carles Samaranch wrote about the memory map of the CBM machines’ BASIC 4.0, Rafael Pardo, “ya conocido por los lectores de MICRO/BIT” (already known to readers of MICRO/BIT), started an electronics section, and Joan V. Baz, a teacher in a village in Tarragona, sent a program that drilled children in their multiplication tables.

Issue 2 is dated November 1982 and issue 3 December 1982, so the first issue probably appeared in October. The run continued monthly to issue 10 in July 1983, whose editorial promised “Volveremos en septiembre” (we’ll be back in September). A subscription cost 1,100 pesetas for “once números anuales” (eleven issues a year) in December 1982, and 1,980 pesetas from February 1983. Commodore Spain’s index of Spanish Commodore magazines lists eleven issues, the last in November 1983.

Decibels and memory maps

The December 1982 issue grew to sixteen pages, and its editorial could not resist the arithmetic: the “salto” (jump) was “exactamente el doble (+3 dB)”, exactly double, three decibels being a doubling of power. By April 1983 the bulletin ran to twenty pages. The December contents show what its makers thought VIC-20 owners wanted:

a memory map of the CBM machines’ BASIC;
a VIC-20 character editor, the fourth part of a series on the VIC-20’s memory map;
a program to encipher and decipher messages;
a BASIC program for designing common-emitter transistor amplifier stages;
a way to trim electric heating bills, which the authors estimated at 10 to 20 per cent, by warming a resistor beside a radiator’s thermostat under the VIC-20’s control;
“inicios del VIC-20 en RTTY”, the VIC-20’s first steps in radio teletype.

The cipher program introduced itself as a use for the VIC-20 in a subject “algo exótico y poco habitual en las revistas serias de informática: el espionaje” (somewhat exotic and unusual in serious computing magazines: espionage). Its worked example enciphers the first words of Don Quixote, “EN UN LUGAR DE LA MANCHA”, with the key “VIC-20 ORDENADOR PERSONAL”, and ends “¡Suerte a los 007 ocasionales!” (good luck to all you part-time 007s). The listing’s REM lines credit Microelectrónica y Control, P. Masats, Barcelona, 14 September 1982.

Radio amateurs and teleprinters

Radio amateurs were an audience Microelectrónica y Control took seriously: it sold a program for logging amateur radio contacts at 3,000 pesetas. The RTTY article in December 1982 tells how the team came across a program called TELEX in a German magazine, translated it, and found that, with a small circuit on the user port, it let a teleprinter serve as a cheap printer for the VIC-20. Their first test printed a string of R’s while they watched the signal on an oscilloscope: one start bit, five data bits, one and a half stop bits, each 22 ms long. “¡era BAUDOT!” (it was Baudot!). The program was 256 bytes of machine code that sent each character in Baudot code at 45.45 baud from pin PB7 of the user port.

In March 1983 a radio amateur who signed only with the call sign EA3CIW sent in a receiving program. It used the RS-232 routines built into the VIC-20 to decode radio-teletype signals, and the article named The Associated Press’s London service, at 50 baud on 6,985.3 kHz, as one of the stations that came in best.

Readers answer back

By March 1983 the editorial could report more than 1,000 regular readers. Readers were also meeting in person: the December issue announced the first meeting of a VIC-20 users’ club in Barcelona for 13 January 1983. At that meeting, the magazine reported, the praise came in “montañas” (mountains) and the only real criticism was of its program listings, which were hard to read. The bulletin already had a culprit for its misprints: when one reader’s listing came out garbled, it apologised and reported that BUG had been stood facing the wall “durante algunos milisegundos” (for a few milliseconds). This time Masats answered with a program that printed listings from disk and replaced each of Commodore’s graphics and control characters with a readable name in brackets. The listings passed from a VIC-20 disk to a CBM 8032 fitted with 4040 and 8050 drives and a CBM 8023 printer that struck every character twice for sharper printing plates. The same 8032 also ran the word processor on which the bulletin’s articles were written.

That March issue was also the first to carry advertising from other companies, which the editorial defended as part of giving users “un canal de información lo más completo posible” (as complete a channel of information as possible). In April 1983 the editorial announced “¡ya ha llegado el nuevo Commodore 64!” (the new Commodore 64 has arrived!), with a specification of the Commodore 64 and, inside, its memory map. By June the tips pages gave POKEs for both machines.

Four languages

The December 1982 editorial ends by wishing its readers happy holidays four times:

¡FELICES FIESTAS Y PRÓSPERO AÑO NUEVO! BON NADAL I FELIÇ 1983! ZORIONAK ETA URTE BERRI ON ¡BOAS FESTAS!

The greetings are in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician. Spain’s 1978 constitution had made Castilian the official language of the state and the other Spanish languages official in their own autonomous communities. The same issue greets its readers from the SIMO show “como decimos en Cataluña” (as we say in Catalonia).

Sources

Club Commodore no. 3, December 1982: cover and masthead; inside front cover (the SIMO stand, Jordi Servat, “como decimos en Cataluña”, photographs by P. Masats); p. 1 (editorial: sixteen pages, “+3 dB”, Rafael Pardo and MICRO/BIT, the four-language greeting; Joan Carles Samaranch on the BASIC 4.0 memory map); pp. 2–3 (the cipher program by P. Masats); pp. 4–5 (R. Pardo, common-emitter stages); pp. 5–6 (“inicios del VIC-20 en RTTY”); pp. 6–8 (M. Sans, heating control; subscription form, 1,100 pesetas, eleven issues a year); p. 9 (Pere Masats and M. Amado, Murphy’s law); pp. 10–11 (the character editor); p. 12 (Joan V. Baz); p. 13 (the QSL logging program at 3,000 pesetas; the Barcelona users’ club meeting of 13 January 1983); p. 16 (letters address); back cover (Microelectrónica y Control as exclusive distributor).
Club Commodore no. 5, February 1983, p. 1: editorial signed by the Departamento de Difusión of Microelectrónica y Control; subscription form at 1,980 pesetas.
Club Commodore no. 6, March 1983: p. 1 (editorial: over 1,000 readers, the first outside advertising); p. 5 (“RTTY para el VIC-20” by EA3CIW); “los nuevos listados de Club Commodore” by P. Masats.
Club Commodore no. 7, April 1983: p. 1 (editorial on the Commodore 64); the Commodore 64 memory map; twenty pages.
Club Commodore no. 9, June 1983, p. 1: P. Masats, POKEs for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.
Club Commodore no. 10, July 1983, p. 1: editorial on M.E.C. SOFT., M. Amado’s disk series and “Volveremos en septiembre”.
Constitución Española, 1978, artículo 3 (web, primary text): https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1978-31229
Internet Archive, “Club Commodore 02” (web, secondary): issue 2, November 1982. https://archive.org/details/ClubCommodore02
Commodore Spain, “Club Commodore” (web, secondary): first issue October 1982, last November 1983, eleven issues. https://www.commodorespain.es/project/club-commodore/