MC-microcomputer
The largest title in this library, and the first Italian entry in this Vault
Technimedia's Italian computing monthly ran 222 issues from September 1981 to June 2001. At 60,950 pages it is the biggest single publication in this project's reference library — larger than Byte, Compute! or Computer Gaming World — and until now the Vault had never mentioned it.
MC-microcomputer was an Italian computing monthly published by Technimedia of Rome. Issue 1 is dated September 1981 and priced at 3,000 lire; the last issue held here is from June 2001. Two hundred and twenty-two issues span those twenty years.
It is the largest single publication in this project’s reference library — 60,950 pages, ahead of Byte, Compute! and Computer Gaming World — and this is the first entry the Vault has written about anything Italian.
Founded on a deadline
The editorial in issue 1, by direttore Paolo Nuti, is not the sort of thing a launch usually opens with. He describes packing a bag for a week’s windsurfing — wetsuit, sail, mast foot — telephoning his condirettore Marco Marinacci to read him the editorial down the line because “this co-editor has something to say about everything”, leaving it on Giovanna Molinari’s desk, and going away to rest after “due mesi e dieci giorni di lavoro frenetico” — two months and ten days of frantic work.
The arithmetic in that sentence is the useful part. The same paragraph dates the publisher: “Technimedia è stata fondata il 21 maggio 1981.” Founded 21 May, first issue September. Two months and ten days is exactly right.
Why it is here
This entry exists because of a gap found by counting. Among titles carrying a territory suffix, the library’s holdings run Britain 265,867 pages, Italy 156,018, the United States 111,812 — and the Vault, until now, was written entirely about the first and third.
Italy is 43 titles. This is one of them, and the largest of anything anywhere in the collection.
⚠ This entry is built from issue 1 and from the shape of the holdings. This library holds MC-microcomputer in enormous quantity and no secondary account of it, so nothing here describes how the magazine changed across twenty years, what it was like to read, or what it meant to Italian computing. Those would all be worth knowing and none of them is claimed.
See also
- Computer and Video Games — the British title that began two months later
- PAGE 6 — the other twenty-year survivor here
- Magazine distribution — the British commercial pattern, which this entry gives no reason to think Italy shared