Mikroprozessortechnik

Mikroprozessortechnik — Zeitschrift für Mikroelektronik, Computertechnik, Informatik — began in East Berlin in 1987, published by VEB Verlag Technik on Oranienburger Straße for the Kammer der Technik, the GDR’s official engineering chamber. This library holds the complete run of four annual volumes, 1987 to 1990.

It is the first East German entry in this Vault, and it is deliberately kept apart from the West German ones. Amiga Joker and this are not two versions of a German computer press.

Licensed, in the literal sense

The colophon carries a line no other magazine in this Vault carries:

“Lizenz-Nr. 1710 des Presseamtes beim Vorsitzenden des Ministerrates der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.”

Licence number 1710, from the Press Office at the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. A magazine existed because the state’s press office numbered it.

Set that beside ST Magazine in France, whose December 1986 editorial reports the Commission paritaire stripping it of accreditation for being too narrow to count as journalism. Two European states, three years apart, and two opposite postures toward a computer magazine: one declining to recognise it as press, the other constituting it as press by numbered licence.

Neither of those things could happen in Britain, which is why a Vault built from British holdings would not know the question exists.

What it was for

The first issue’s lead article states the purpose in its title — Felix Meier, “Mikroelektronik: Schlüsseltechnologie für die dynamische Entwicklung unserer Volkswirtschaft”: microelectronics as the key technology for the dynamic development of our national economy.

The rest of the issue is engineering, not consumer press: the U5200 CMOS gate-array system, the RTS8000 real-time operating system, an intelligent process-coupling module. Behind it sits an advisory board of some two dozen professors and doctors.

Its programming courses, held here alongside the volumes, are the clearest statement of where this computing sat: courses on K1810WM86 — the Soviet 8086 clone — and on REDABAS, the GDR’s dBASE. Not localised Western products, and not clones described from outside, but the domestic stack taught to the engineers expected to use it.

⚠ This entry is built from the 1987 volume’s opening pages and the file list of the run. This library holds no secondary account of the journal, so nothing here describes its readership, its print run, or what became of it after 1990 — the run held stops there, which is suggestive but is not evidence of closure.

See also

• ST Magazine — the opposite ruling, in France
• Bajtek — Poland’s state-attached magazine, aimed at the young rather than at engineers
• Amiga Joker, PC Player — the West German titles, kept separate on purpose
• The C64 across borders