Commodore Computer Club

Commodore Computer Club was published from Piazza Arduino, Milan, from September 1982 to December 1991 — ninety issues over nine years, under direttore responsabile Michele Di Pisa.

It is the earliest club magazine in this library. Club Commodore in Spain follows it by about a month, Atari Club Magazin by four, and Club Nintendo by seven years.

A Commodore 64 preview in September 1982

Issue one leads with “Anteprima: Commodore 64” — a preview of a machine announced in January 1982 and only then reaching buyers. Around it sit seven programs for the VIC and the PET, a part-work course (un corso a dispense) called Impara a programmare col VIC, an article on PET machine language, and one on what is in the VIC’s memory.

The interview is with Dario Baldan Bembo, introduced as a “compucantautore” — a computer singer-songwriter, a coinage the magazine appears to have made for him. The cover addresses its readers as “Commodoristi”.

Paid in cassettes

The contributor terms on page 51 are worth recording because they are not money:

“ciascun articolo e/o programma pubblicato… verrà compensato con l’invio d’una intera scatola di cassette e/o dischetti.”

Each article or program published will be compensated with a whole box of cassettes or diskettes. The rights position is broad in the other direction — reproduction rights are “ceduti illimitatamente all’editore”, ceded without limit, explicitly including use in “banche per lo scambio di programmi”, program-exchange banks.

Compare MICRO-80 in Australia three years earlier, which bought reader programs and paid royalties in cash. Two magazines with the same reader-supplied model and quite different terms.

Whose club?

Nothing in the first issue claims a relationship with Commodore. There is no manufacturer’s address, no distributor’s imprint, no licence line — the publisher is a Milanese editorial office, and the magazine is registered as a supplement under a Tribunale di Milano number issued on 3 December 1979, nearly three years before it launched.

⚠ So this belongs with Nintendo Magazine System’s Australian edition and Australian Personal Computer in the group this Vault cannot classify: a magazine carrying a manufacturer’s name whose relationship to that manufacturer is not stated anywhere found here. Unlike Spain’s Club Commodore, which prints its publisher’s status as Commodore’s exclusive Spanish distributor, this one prints nothing.

See also

• Club Commodore — the Spanish one, a distributor’s bulletin
• Magazines across borders
• MC-microcomputer, PAPERsoft — the other Italian entries
• Commodore 64