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MCmicrocomputer

Rome's computing monthly, from the Atari 800 to the digital camera, 1981 to 2001

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MCmicrocomputer was an Italian computing monthly published in Rome from September 1981 to June 2001. Paolo Nuti and Marco Marinacci started it, with the new publisher Technimedia, as a continuation of the magazine Micro & Personal Computer. It ran 218 issues, opened the MC-Link online service in 1986, passed to Pluricom in 1999 and closed with that company in 2001.

MCmicrocomputer (usually just MC) was one of Italy’s longest-running computer magazines: a monthly from Rome that ran for twenty years, from September 1981 to June 2001. It began with a first issue that tested an Atari 800 and a Corvus hard disk, and it ended with a special on digital cameras. Along the way it covered the arrival of the Commodore 64 in Italy, opened its own online service, and outlived its first publisher.

Seventy days from desks to newsstand

MC was the work of Paolo Nuti, its direttore, and Marco Marinacci, his condirettore. They had worked together before. In September 1979 Nuti had started Micro & Personal Computer as a supplement to the hi-fi magazine Suono, from the Gruppo Editoriale Suono, with Marinacci among its contributors. Nuti’s editorial in MC’s first issue wondered whether to treat it as a first issue at all, or as “the continuation of work begun two years ago”.

The new publisher, Technimedia, was founded on 21 May 1981 in Rome, at Via Valsolda 135. It launched two magazines at once: MCmicrocomputer and the hi-fi title AUDIOreview, which went on sale beside it on 3 September. Issue 1, dated September 1981, cost 3,000 lire.

Nuti’s first editorial, “In caso di bisogno fate un fischio” (“If you need us, whistle”), is dated by its own story. On Saturday 1 August, with his windsurfing kit packed, he telephoned Marinacci to read him the editorial (“you never know, this co-director has something to say about everything”), left it on Giovanna Molinari’s desk and went off for a week of rest after “two months and ten days of frantic work”. Seventy days earlier, he wrote, “we had not yet ordered the desks”. The magazine’s purpose, as he put it, was to carry on “demystifying white-coat computing” and bringing computing within reach of “everyone who knows how to use their brain”.

The first issue tested an Atari 800, a Watanabe plotter with ten pens, a 5-megabyte Corvus hard disk and a Texas Instruments RPN simulator, and carried a special report from Tokyo. Its contributors included Bo Arnklit, credited with ricerca e sviluppo (research and development), and Corrado Giustozzi, who would stay with the magazine for years.

Watching the home computers arrive

MC reported on business machines and home computers alike, and its news pages give an Italian view of the early 1980s. In May 1982 it reported that Commodore’s Italian company had become fully operational on 12 May, and in December 1982 it printed its first look at the Commodore 64, which had been shown in Italy for the first time at the SMAU exhibition in Milan, “not working, behind a glass case”. Five years later Nuti could write in his end-of-year editorial of “the million C64s sold in Italy”, and of a boom in cheap home PCs that he could compare only to “the boom of the Commodore 64”. The C64 across borders entry follows that story.

The magazine grew with the market. The cover price rose to 5,000 lire by 1987, 6,000 by 1988 and 9,000 by 1996. By the late 1980s its masthead listed a large team of contributors, among them Andrea de Prisco, Raffaello De Masi, Valter Di Dio and Massimo Truscelli.

In September 1986 MC went online. Its issue for that month announced, with “trumpet blasts and drum rolls”, that from 1 September MC-Link had begun its official trial: “a public and free telematic service created within MCmicrocomputer as an interactive extension of the magazine”. Anyone with a modem and a communications program could dial in, 24 hours a day, to send and receive messages, take part in conferences, read small ads and consult the indexes of MC and AUDIOreview, and download the listings of the programs printed in the magazine. Corrado Giustozzi explained the service to readers in a feature that month. By 1994 Marinacci was signing letters as MC-Link’s direttore responsabile, and the service later became an internet service provider and a company in its own right.

Pluricom and the end

At the end of the 1990s Technimedia got into trouble. In February 1999 MC printed a notice from the company’s liquidator, Filippo Varazi: the restructuring of “Technimedia srl in liquidation” was nearly over, and from the following month the magazine’s publisher would be the newly formed Pluricom srl. From the March 1999 issue MC was published by Pluricom, at Viale Ettore Franceschini 73 in Rome. Marinacci wrote the editorials, as he had since June 1998, and Nuti still contributed articles.

The last issue, number 218, is dated June 2001. It gives no sign that it is the last: Marinacci’s editorial is about giving up the darkroom for a digital camera, and ends by advising readers to buy one. According to later accounts, Pluricom ceased trading that summer, and a 219th issue for July and August 2001 was laid out but never printed for lack of money.

Sources

  • MCmicrocomputer no. 1, September 1981: masthead (price, Paolo Nuti, Marco Marinacci, Bo Arnklit, Corrado Giustozzi among the contributors, Technimedia s.r.l., Via Valsolda 135); Paolo Nuti, editorial “In caso di bisogno fate un fischio” (1 August, Giovanna Molinari, “due mesi e dieci giorni di lavoro frenetico”, “Technimedia è stata fondata il 21 maggio 1981”, 70 days, the desks, AUDIOreview on 3 September, “la prosecuzione di un lavoro iniziato due anni or sono”); contents (Atari 800, Watanabe plotter, Corvus 5 MB, Texas Instruments RPN simulator, the Japan special).
  • “Micro & Personal Computer 001”, Internet Archive (web, secondary): “n° 1, supplemento al n° 85 di ‘Suono’, settembre 1979”, Gruppo Editoriale Suono. https://archive.org/details/MePC001
  • “Micro & Personal Computer”, Storia Informatica (web, secondary): the magazine started with Paolo Nuti at the helm, Marco Marinacci among its leading contributors. https://www.storiainformatica.it/home/libri-e-riviste?view=article&id=812:micro-personal-computer&catid=32
  • MCmicrocomputer no. 9, May 1982, MC news: Commodore Italiana. No. 14, December 1982, “Anteprima Commodore 64”.
  • Paolo Nuti, editorial, MCmicrocomputer no. 69, December 1987, p. 18: “il milione di C64 venduti in Italia”, “il boom del Commodore 64”; masthead contributors.
  • MCmicrocomputer mastheads: L. 5,000 (1987), L. 6,000 (November 1988), L. 9,000 (June 1996).
  • MCmicrocomputer no. 55, September 1986: “Arriva MC-Link”, announcement and feature by Corrado Giustozzi. No. 139, April 1994: letters signed by Marco Marinacci as “Direttore Responsabile di MC-link”.
  • MCmicrocomputer no. 192, February 1999: “MCmicrocomputer passa alla Pluricom srl”, notice signed by Filippo Varazi. No. 193, March 1999, and later issues: Pluricom as publisher, editorials by Marco Marinacci. No. 184, May 1998: editorial by Paolo Nuti; no. 185, June 1998, onwards: editorials by Marinacci. No. 193, March 1999: Nuti’s article “Il cavo e le forbici”. No. 197, July 1999: Pluricom’s address.
  • MCmicrocomputer no. 218, June 2001: Marco Marinacci’s editorial.
  • “MC microcomputer 218”, Internet Archive (web, secondary): the last issue in the public scan run. https://archive.org/details/MC_microcomputer-218
  • “MCmicrocomputer”, Italian Wikipedia (web, secondary): origins in Micro & Personal Computer, MC-Link’s later history, Pluricom’s closure, the unprinted issue 219. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCmicrocomputer

See also

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