MICRO-80 was a monthly magazine for owners of the Tandy TRS-80, published from a post office box in Goodwood, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. Its first issue, dated December 1979, cost $2.50 and called itself “the first and only Australian monthly magazine devoted entirely to the TRS-80 microcomputer”. It was not Tandy’s magazine. “MICRO-80 is in no way connected with the TANDY organisation,” the editorial said, and the magazine went on to cover the cheaper clones that competed with Tandy’s machine.
Five months later, in May 1980, Australian Personal Computer launched with “Australia’s first micro magazine” on its cover. In that same first issue, a TRS-80 dealer in Kent Street, Sydney, advertised that it stocked “the full range of MICRO-80 newsletters and recorded software”.
Programs bought from readers
The first editorial set out how the magazine would fill its pages:
“WE WILL BUY YOUR PROGRAMS! Most of the information we publish is provided by our readers, to whom we pay royalties. An application form containing full details of how you can use your TRS-80 to earn some extra income is included in every issue.”
Each month it promised at least one program in Level I BASIC, one in Level II and one in Disk BASIC, utilities in BASIC and machine language, and an article on a hardware modification or a home-built peripheral at least every second issue. The first issue’s programs included Super Mastermind, a digital clock, a word processor, and an article on improving Tandy’s CTR-41 cassette recorder. Advertising cost $120 a page and classified advertisements $8 for fifty words.
The magazine was run alongside a business, MICRO-80 PRODUCTS, which sold software and hardware; by mid-1980 it was building a memory expansion unit for the TRS-80.
Every listing on tape
Readers who did not want to type could buy the programs:
“…in each month’s issue are available on a cassette for an additional $3.50. [You] can order a 12 month subscription to the magazine PLUS cassette for $60.00, only $5.00 per month.”
The cassette was sold separately or by subscription, not fixed to the cover; later it was offered on disk as well. The same first issue asked readers not to copy it, in unusually frank terms:
“Being practical, if you copied a program onto cassette and gave it to a friend who is not a subscriber to MICRO-80, we would be unlikely to sue you, even if we found out. However, that’s a pretty good way to put us out of business, then there would be no more programs to copy and no more money to be earned when we publish your programs! Think about it.”
The magazine’s argument was that copying would cut off the royalties paid to the readers who wrote the programs. That frank passage appeared only in the first issue; later issues kept a shorter copyright notice without it.
The show stand and the System 80
In May 1980 MICRO-80 took a stand at the Sydney Home Computer Show, “nestled between” Tandy and Dick Smith Electronics. People stood “three deep” at the stand, the June editorial reported, and much of the interest was in the System 80 on display, a Dick Smith computer built to run TRS-80 software, though the magazine found differences that meant much of its own software needed changes first. A senior member “of the Dick Smith camp” thanked the magazine for its objective assessment and said Dick Smith was trying to make the design “EXACTLY the same as the TRS-80”.
The same editorial gives a picture of the Australian market. Tandy advertised “over 150,000 sold” worldwide, while BYTE had quoted a Radio Shack executive saying 370,000 TRS-80s had been made by March 1980. Tandy was “cagey” about Australian sales; the figure most often heard was 6,000, which some said counted only Level II machines, with nearer 10,000 in all.
An international magazine from Adelaide
By June 1982 MICRO-80 described itself as “an international magazine devoted entirely to the Tandy TRS-80 microcomputer and the Dick Smith System 80/Video Genie”, and also printed programs for Tandy’s Colour Computer. It had a subscription office in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, an agent in Christchurch, New Zealand, and airmail rates for Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Japan, North America and the Middle East. Ian Vagg was editor, with Charlie Bartlett as software editor and Edwin Paay as hardware editor.
Growth had a cost. In the same issue Vagg admitted that the magazine was “over four months behind our cover date”, because editing it was too much to combine with his other work. He announced a full-time editor, Ryszard (Richard) Wiwatowski, a high school science teacher and System 80 owner who had been the magazine’s Colour Computer software editor. Wiwatowski is named as editor in July 1983; by January 1984 Vagg was editor again.
In 1984 the magazine added Dick Smith’s VZ-200 and the Hitachi Peach to its list of machines, and the cover price rose to $3.50. One editorial that year welcomed the Federal Government’s decision to drop customs duty on imported software. Until then, it explained, software from most countries paid 35% import duty and then, usually, 24% sales tax on the duty-paid price, 67.4% in all. The latest issue found in public sources is volume 4 number 8, from 1984, and they do not record when or why the magazine stopped.
Sources
- MICRO-80 issue 1, December 1979, pp. 1–3: masthead, price, editorial (purpose, independence from Tandy, buying programs, contents, advertising rates), cassette offer, copyright notice, software section.
- MICRO-80 issue 7, June 1980, p. 2: editorial (the Sydney Home Computer Show, the System 80, TRS-80 sales figures, MICRO-80 PRODUCTS, the memory expansion unit).
- MICRO-80 vol. 3 no. 7, June 1982: “About MICRO-80” (machines covered, prices, overseas agents, editors) and editorial (publication delays, the new editor).
- MICRO-80 vol. 3 no. 12, July 1983; vol. 4 no. 6, January 1984: mastheads.
- MICRO-80 vol. 4 no. 8, 1984: masthead (machines covered, price) and editorial, p. 2 (software import duty).
- Australian Personal Computer vol. 1 no. 1, May 1980: cover; dealer advertisement (159 Kent Street, Sydney).