INPUT was a programming course sold one part a week at the newsagent. Each part was a magazine of about 32 pages; after 52 weeks the parts filled four binders and made a single course of more than 1,600 numbered pages, from a number-guessing game in part 1 to machine code, sprite graphics and a cross-referenced index in part 52. What set it apart was that it taught five computers at once. A Spectrum owner, a Commodore 64 owner and a BBC Micro owner could follow the same lesson, each with their own version of the listing, marked with a symbol for their machine.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Partworks, London.
- Run: 52 weekly parts, 1984–1985, in four binders of 13 parts.
- Price: 95p a part at launch; binders £3.95 each.
- Editor: Andrew Kemp.
- Machines: “specially designed for” the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro and Dragon 32, with much of it suitable for the ZX81, VIC-20 and Tandy Colour Computer.
- Abroad: a Brazilian edition from Editora Nova Cultural in 1986, adapted for Brazilian machines.
How the course worked
Part 1 set out the method on its first page: “Learning to program a computer is a bit like learning to play football.” You could practise one skill at a time and only step onto the pitch when you had mastered them all, “but you would learn slowly - and have very little fun in the process”. So INPUT started with a game. Its first lesson has the computer “invent” a random number for the player to guess, and explains RND along the way, with a note on why the Spectrum seeds its generator with RANDOMIZE while the Acorn, Commodore and Dragon machines use a negative number in RND.
Each part mixed articles from a handful of running strands, each numbered through the whole course: Basic Programming, Machine Code, Games Programming, Applications and Peripherals. Page numbers ran on from part to part, so that the bound set read as one book. A typical week in the middle of the run, part 22, offered a lesson on simple music, a program to convert Commodore tape software for a disk drive, advice on caring for tapes and disks, and a text compressor put to work on an adventure game. By part 40 readers were typing in a version of the Game of Life written in machine code, because “in BASIC this would be impossibly slow”, so that each generation appeared “in about one second”.
Where the machines differed, the text said so. Program lines and explanations for a single machine were marked with its symbol, and the BBC B and Electron shared one. Corrections arrived on separate amendment sheets. Part 52 closed the course with an index to parts 1–51 and a note to readers: “Whether you have typed in all the programs yet or not, you will still want to keep INPUT as a source of reference material for the future.”
The Imagine deal
INPUT was meant to come with software. Marshall Cavendish signed a deal with the Liverpool games company Imagine Software early in 1984; CRASH later reported that it “may have been worth as much as £11 million” to Imagine. Retro Gamer describes it as a contract for “fortnightly multi-format cover tapes containing computer games”.
It went wrong quickly. Sinclair User reported in May 1984 that Imagine “was to have produced 30 programs for the publication but Marshall Cavendish rejected them”, and quoted an Imagine spokesman: “Marshall Cavendish decided that it did not want to publish the programs with the part-work.” In August the magazine added that the publisher had “demanded repayment of a £200,000 advance”. CRASH’s account agrees: Marshall Cavendish “became disenchanted by the lack of progress on their games”, was “unhappy with the quality of what was ready”, and “pulled out and wanted their money back”. Sinclair User counted the demand among the causes of Imagine’s troubles; the company was wound up in July 1984. INPUT went on without the tapes, as a course of listings for readers to type in themselves.
Abroad
The course travelled. In Brazil, Editora Nova Cultural of São Paulo published INPUT in Portuguese in 1986, with Marshall Cavendish’s copyright on the masthead and the listings rewritten for the machines Brazilian readers used: the TK-90X, the TK-2000, the CP 400, MSX computers, the Apple II and the TRS-80. In Spain, Ediciones Forum launched a monthly INPUT Commodore in September 1985 that credited its illustrations to Marshall Cavendish.
Other part-works
INPUT was not the first computing part-work. Orbis Publishing’s The Home Computer Course was on sale in 1983 at 80p a part, and Orbis followed it with The Home Computer Advanced Course.
Sources
- INPUT, part 1 (Marshall Cavendish Partworks, 1984): price, binders, the machines covered, the football analogy and the number-guessing game.
- INPUT, part 22: contents. Part 40: “Machine Code Life Game”. Part 52: index to parts 1–51, the closing note to readers, staff list. (The parts were reprinted later; copies dated up to 1987 cost £1.00 and list the Spectrum 128, Commodore 128 and BBC B+.)
- Sinclair User issue 26, May 1984, news pages: Imagine, Marshall Cavendish and the rejected programs for Input.
- Sinclair User issue 29, August 1984, news pages: the £200,000 advance.
- Roger Kean, “The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All”, CRASH issue 12, Christmas Special 1984/85, pp. 60–63: the Marshall Cavendish deal from Imagine’s side.
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005: the deal as one for multi-format cover tapes.
- INPUT, Brazilian edition (Editora Nova Cultural, São Paulo, 1986): masthead and the machines covered.
- INPUT Commodore issue 1, September 1985 (Ediciones Forum, Madrid): masthead and credits.
- The Home Computer Course (Orbis Publishing, 1983) and The Home Computer Advanced Course, part 1 (Orbis Publishing): price and publisher.