Commodore Computer Club | Code Like It's 198x

The first issue of Commodore Computer Club, dated September 1982, put a pop star on its cover. Dario Baldan Bembo, whose album Aria had made his name and who had come third at Sanremo in 1981, used a Commodore PET to catalogue his tapes, work out his royalties and note down his musical ideas, and the magazine called him a compu-cantautore, a computer singer-songwriter. Inside, it previewed a machine most Italians had not yet seen, the Commodore 64. The magazine ran under Commodore’s name for nine years, then dropped it and carried on.

Fast facts

Published: Milan, from September 1982; monthly for most of its life. Issue 84, May 1991, was the last under the Commodore name.
Founder and direttore responsabile: Michele Di Pisa. Editorial staff in issue 1: Alessandro De Simone and Franco Rao.
Publisher: MiniSystems Italia, later Systems Editoriale, Piazza Arduino 3, Milan. It began as a supplement to Di Pisa’s magazine Computer.
Machines: the PET and the VIC-20 at first, then the Commodore 64 above all, and the Amiga from the late 1980s.
Later names: Computer Club (June 1991), Personal Computer Club (November 1991), Inter.net (1995).

“Invito al club”

Di Pisa’s first editorial explained what the magazine was for. The PET, he wrote, had been the first personal computer to land in Italy, and about 30 per cent of the country’s personal computer owners now had a Commodore machine, “from the little VIC to the more powerful 8032”. Abroad, and above all in America, magazines devoted to a single make of computer were everywhere. Italy had general computing titles and general personal computing titles, which he called the first and second generations; Commodore Computer Club was to be the third, la prima rivista italiana di personal computing mono-marca, the first Italian personal computing magazine devoted to one brand. It wanted to be a club in more than name: “come in ogni club tutti i frequentatori debbono contribuire al suo successo”, as in any club, everyone who comes along must contribute to its success.

A Commodore 64 preview in September 1982

Commodore had shown the 64 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1982, and the first issue’s Anteprima explained what the fuss was about: 64K of memory built in, “un sintetizzatore musicale a livello professionale”, a professional-level music synthesiser, high-resolution graphics in 16 colours and a 66-key keyboard, all for the price of a small personal computer. A table set its American base price, counted as 100, against the Apple II+ at 257, an IBM at 263, the TRS-80 Model III at 167 and the Atari 800 at 151. Around the preview sat seven programs for the VIC and the PET, among them a dragon hunt, a musical keyboard, a space invasion and a dice roller for board games, the first instalment of a part-work course, Impara a programmare col VIC, an article on PET machine language and another on what was in the VIC’s memory.

Paid in cassettes

The magazine’s terms for contributors, printed under the heading Scrivi anche tu (you write too), paid in kind. Anyone who sent a program on cassette or disk received two new cassettes or disks for each one sent, whether or not it was published. Each article or program that was published earned “l’invio d’una intera scatola di cassette e/o dischetti”, a whole box of cassettes or disks. In return the reproduction rights were “ceduti illimitatamente all’editore”, ceded without limit to the publisher, for the magazine, for program-exchange libraries “e così via”, and so on. Spain’s Amstrad Semanal three years later paid its readers in cash, up to 100,000 pesetas a program.

Whose club?

Despite its name, the magazine was not Commodore’s. Its first issue names no relationship with the manufacturer: the publisher is Di Pisa’s own Milanese company, and it appeared under the court registration of his magazine Computer, as a supplement to it, before gaining a registration of its own (Tribunale di Milano no. 370, 2 October 1982). That set it apart from Spain’s Club Commodore, a bulletin published by Commodore’s exclusive Spanish distributor.

In June 1991, issue 85, the Commodore name went. Alessandro de Simone, by then running the magazine day to day, explained in his editorial that falling prices let enthusiasts own several machines, “non necessariamente tutte di una marca unica”, not necessarily all of one make, so the title was now Computer Club, “priva di riferimenti ad un qualsivoglia nome commerciale”, free of any trade name. Italian Wikipedia, drawing on the Commodore fan site Ready64, gives a different reason: that agreements of a legal kind with Commodore had lapsed. In November 1991, issue 89, Systems merged its Personal Computer into the magazine, which became Personal Computer Club and covered Amiga and MS-DOS machines side by side.

Later history

Systems says the magazine at its peak sold more than 84,000 copies a month. In April 1995 it changed its name once more, to Inter.net, a magazine about the internet; Italian Wikipedia records that Open Source replaced Inter.net in 2003.

Sources

Commodore Computer Club issue 1, September 1982: cover; contents and masthead (p. 3); editorial “Invito al club” (p. 5); “Dario Baldan Bembo, compu-cantautore” (pp. 6–7); “Anteprima: Commodore 64” (pp. 14–17, with the comparison table); “Scrivi anche tu” (p. 51).
Commodore Computer Club issue 2, December 1982: cover line, “Suppl. a ‘Computer’ n. 54”.
Commodore Computer Club issue 5, September 1983: masthead (Tribunale di Milano registration no. 370 of 2 October 1982).
Commodore Computer Club issue 30, April 1986: Systems Editoriale as publisher.
Commodore Computer Club issue 84, 25 May 1991: cover.
Computer Club issue 85, 25 June 1991: editorial by Alessandro de Simone on the new name.
Personal Computer Club issue 89, 25 November 1991: editorial on the merger with Personal Computer.
David D. Thornburg, Compute! issue 22, March 1982, p. 26: the Commodore 64 at the January 1982 Winter CES.
Systems Comunicazioni, “Michele Di Pisa” (web, secondary): MiniSystems Italia, Computer, the 1982 launch, more than 84,000 copies sold monthly, the 1995 change to Inter.net. https://systems.it/index.php/michele-di-pisa/
“Commodore Computer Club”, Italian Wikipedia (web, secondary): the supplement to Computer, the dates of issues 85 and 89, the lapsed agreements with Commodore, Inter.net and Open Source. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Computer_Club