COMPUTE! | Code Like It's 198x

The first issue of COMPUTE! called itself “The PET Gazette With A New Name”. It appeared in the autumn of 1979, cost $2.00, and came from Greensboro, North Carolina, where Robert Lock’s company, Small System Services, also ran a computer shop called The Corner Computer Store. Lock was open about it in his first “Publisher’s Remarks”: “we see no point in trying to avoid the fact that we’re a multi-faceted company.” Four years later COMPUTE! was printing more than 300,000 copies a month, had been bought by the television network ABC, and had given its name to a sister magazine for Commodore owners. What it printed, above all, was programs: listings for several different computers in the same issue, which readers typed in line by line.

Fast facts

First issue: autumn 1979, $2.00, six issues a year at first; monthly from 1981.
Publishers: Small System Services, Inc. (1979–1983); COMPUTE! Publications, Inc., a division of ABC Publishing (1983–1990); COMPUTE Publications, owned by General Media (1990–1994).
Founder: Robert C. Lock, president of Small System Services and the magazine’s editor in chief.
Machines covered: at first the PET, Apple II, Atari and single-board 6502 computers; later the VIC-20, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga and others.
Type-in checkers: MLX (December 1983) and the Automatic Proofreader, both by Charles Brannon.
Circulation: an average of about 371,000 paid copies an issue in the year to September 1986, by its own sworn statement.
Sister magazines: COMPUTE!’s Gazette (from 1983), COMPUTE! II (1980), COMPUTE!’s Atari ST, COMPUTE!’s PC Magazine, COMPUTE!’s Apple Applications and COMPUTE!’s Amiga Resource.
Last issue: September 1994, number 168.

The PET Gazette

COMPUTE! grew out of a newsletter. Len Lindsay started The PET Gazette in April 1978 for owners of Commodore’s new PET, and his account of it in COMPUTE!’s first issue is candid. He wrote and mailed the first issue before his own PET had arrived, and by the second, “then almost 100 readers” were getting programming advice from a man who still did not own the machine. One suggestion, indenting the inside of FOR…NEXT loops, turned out not to work: the PET threw the spaces away. By the fourth issue he was hand-collating 400 copies. The Gazette became a magazine, printed reviews and program listings, and warned readers on every cover: “Never buy a product unless you are sure it exists.”

Lock’s company took it over and widened it. The first COMPUTE! was organised around the 6502 processor that the PET shared with the Apple II, the Atari 400 and 800 and several single-board computers, with separate “Gazettes” inside for PET, Atari, Apple and single-board owners. Lindsay stayed on as senior contributing editor for Commodore products, and the masthead promised to stay as useful as “the original non-profit PET Gazette”, although COMPUTE!, Lock added, “is not a non-profit magazine (at least it’s not intended to be)”. Its subtitle was The Journal for Progressive Computing.

Programs for every machine

As cheap home computers arrived, the magazine followed them. By the mid-1980s a typical issue carried a game or utility in versions for four or five machines at once, marked with codes such as AT, 64, V, AP and PC in the contents, and a page on how to type them in. Its March 1985 cover advertised Space Caverns, a “ready-to-type action game for Apple, IBM PC, PCjr, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Atari”.

Typing errors were the constant problem, and the magazine was frank about its own. From 1980 it printed its corrections under the heading “CAPUTE!”. Its program editor, Charles Brannon, then wrote two programs to catch mistakes as the reader made them. The Automatic Proofreader, first printed in COMPUTE!’s Gazette in October 1983, displayed a checksum after every BASIC line so the reader could compare it with the one printed in the magazine. MLX, the “Machine Language Entry Program for Atari and Commodore 64”, appeared in COMPUTE! in December 1983. Machine code had usually been printed as pages of DATA statements, and Brannon described what typing them was like: “go back, proofread, try to run the program, crash, go back and proofread again, correct a few typing errors, run again, crash, recheck your typing — frustrating, isn’t it?” MLX checked each line of numbers as it was typed, refused anything over 255, and wrote out a finished program file. “In short,” he wrote, “MLX should make proofreading obsolete!” The type-in listings entry describes how the two checkers worked.

The best-known program the company published was Brannon’s word processor SpeedScript, written entirely in machine language. It first appeared in the Gazette for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and COMPUTE! called it “the most popular program ever published by COMPUTE! Publications”. In March 1985 COMPUTE! printed SpeedScript 3.0, with versions for the Commodore 64, VIC-20, Atari and Apple II to follow, and for the first time sold a disk of the issue’s Commodore 64 programs for readers who did not want to type them.

Growth and ABC

The growth was fast. The magazine’s statement of ownership at the end of 1981 gave its average print run as about 32,000 copies. In June 1983 Lock wrote that COMPUTE! had broken 100,000 the previous October and that the press run for that issue was 315,000. The same editorial announced that the company had become “the eleventh operating division of ABC Publishing”, part of the American Broadcasting Companies, and that COMPUTE!’s Gazette, for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, was “premiering this month with an initial press run of 175,000 copies”. By September 1983 Gary Ingersoll, formerly president of ABC’s Chilton Company, had arrived as president and publisher, and Lock became chief executive and remained editor in chief.

The sworn circulation figures, which American magazines printed once a year, show where it settled. Average paid circulation was about 230,000 copies an issue in the year to September 1983, 345,000 in the year to September 1984, and 371,000 in the year to September 1986, the highest of the statements printed in the magazine. It then fell each year, to about 257,000 by 1990.

Without the type-ins

In May 1988 COMPUTE! stopped printing programs. “With this issue,” Gregg Keizer wrote in the editorial, “COMPUTE! magazine begins a new era, one that doesn’t include type-in programs.” It was no longer possible, he explained, “to offer top quality type-in programs for all machines”, and readers were “less inclined to type in those programs”. In their place came buyer’s guides, more reviews, and columns including “Gameplay” by the science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card. COMPUTE!’s Gazette carried on printing listings for Commodore owners.

In 1990 Capital Cities/ABC sold its consumer magazines. General Media, the publisher of Omni and Penthouse, bought the COMPUTE! titles and folded them into one magazine, COMPUTE, without the exclamation mark, with separate editions for Amiga, PC and Commodore 64 and 128 owners; the Gazette carried on as a section inside the Commodore edition, still with type-in programs. The October 1990 issue explained the change. The merged magazine’s paid circulation briefly rose again, to an average of about 348,000 in the year to September 1991, before falling to about 282,000 in 1993.

The end

The last issue was dated September 1994, number 168. Nothing in it says so: its hardware column still promises “NEXT MONTH: SUPER VIDEO CARDS”. General Media then sold the magazine to Ziff-Davis, which closed it and offered its subscribers other Ziff-Davis magazines in its place.

Sources

COMPUTE! issue 1, autumn 1979: cover; masthead and staff list; Robert Lock, “Publisher’s Remarks” (Small System Services, The Corner Computer Store, the non-profit PET Gazette); Len Lindsay, “The Evolution of a Magazine”, pp. 65–66 (the PET Gazette from April 1978, the first issues, the warning).
COMPUTE! issue 5, August 1980: contents page (“CAPUTE!”, Robert Lock) and statement of publication (“published six times each year by Small System Services”).
COMPUTE! issue 20, January 1982: statement of ownership, management and circulation (average press run 31,961).
COMPUTE! issue 37, June 1983, p. 6: Robert Lock, “Editor’s Notes” (ABC Publishing; 100,000 in October 1982; press run of 315,000; the Gazette’s first press run of 175,000).
COMPUTE! issue 40, September 1983, p. 6: “Editor’s Notes” (Gary Ingersoll; Lock as chief executive officer and editor in chief).
COMPUTE!’s Gazette issue 4, October 1983: “The Automatic Proofreader” by Charles Brannon, and the editor’s note introducing it.
COMPUTE! issue 43, December 1983, p. 216: Charles Brannon, “MLX: Machine Language Entry Program for Atari and Commodore 64”; the same issue’s statement of ownership (owner American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.; average paid circulation 229,820).
COMPUTE! issue 55, December 1984; issue 68, January 1986; issue 80, January 1987; issue 92, January 1988; issue 104, January 1989; issue 116, January 1990; issue 124, December 1990; issue 136, December 1991; issue 159, December 1993: annual statements of ownership, management and circulation.
COMPUTE! issue 56, January 1985: editorial announcing SpeedScript 3.0 (“the most popular program ever published by COMPUTE! Publications”).
COMPUTE! issue 58, March 1985: cover; SpeedScript 3.0; editorial on the disk of the issue’s programs.
COMPUTE! issue 96, May 1988: Gregg Keizer, editorial (“a new era, one that doesn’t include type-in programs”; Orson Scott Card’s “Gameplay”).
COMPUTE issue 122, October 1990, Gazette section, p. G1: “64/128 View” (Capital Cities/ABC’s sale; General Media; one magazine with machine-specific editions).
COMPUTE issue 168, September 1994, p. 29 (“NEXT MONTH”).
David L. Farquhar, “Compute Magazine, 1979-1994”, The Silicon Underground (web, secondary): the final issue, the sale to Ziff Davis and the offer to subscribers. https://dfarq.homeip.net/compute-magazine-1979-1994/
“Compute!”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), citing the Greensboro News & Record, 8 August 1994: Ziff-Davis’s purchase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute!