Mikroprozessortechnik, MP to its readers, was East Germany’s journal for the people who designed and programmed its computers. It began in January 1987 as a monthly from VEB Verlag Technik in East Berlin, issued for the Kammer der Technik, the GDR’s chamber of engineers. Its first article was a greeting from a government minister setting out the targets of the five-year plan. In 1990 the same masthead recorded the end of the state that had licensed it, issue by issue: the licence line named a new authority, then shrank to a bare number and disappeared; the publisher became a limited company; articles arrived from West German magazines; and the price of 5 marks became 5 Deutschmarks.
A journal for the plan
The first issue went to press on 14 November 1986. Its colophon gave the title’s full name, Zeitschrift für Mikroelektronik, Computertechnik, Informatik, and its licence: number 1710 of the press office of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. An issue cost 5 marks, or 15 marks for a quarterly subscription. The colophon listed where foreign readers could subscribe: in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba, and through dealers in West Germany, West Berlin, Austria and Switzerland.
The opening article, “Mikroelektronik — Schlüsseltechnologie für die dynamische Entwicklung unserer Volkswirtschaft” (microelectronics, the key technology for the dynamic development of our national economy), was signed by Felix Meier, Minister for Electrical Engineering and Electronics. It quoted the directive of the SED’s Eleventh Party Congress for the 1986–1990 plan. By 1990, Meier wrote, the Robotron combine would supply at least 170,000 office and personal computers, and young people in schools and universities had to become familiar with computing “at the earliest possible moment”. He gave the new journal a job: to act as a Mittler von Wissen und Erkenntnissen, a go-between for knowledge and findings.
The rest of the issue was written for engineers. It covered the U5200 CMOS gate-array system from the microelectronics research centre in Dresden, the IRTS 8000 real-time operating system, an intelligent process-coupling module, Czechoslovakia’s SM 52/12 32-bit minicomputer, and Robotron’s new KC 87 home computer. An advisory board of twenty academics and engineers, chaired by Professor Michael Roth, stood behind the editorial staff of two: Ingo Paszkowsky as responsible editor and Hans Weiß. Weiß took over as responsible editor in 1988. The year’s twelve issues ran to 384 pages.
The MP-Kurs
Most issues carried a part of a course, the MP-Kurs, and the courses show what an East German developer was expected to work with. The first, in January 1987, was Thomas Horn’s “Programmierung in C”. Later that year a pair of authors from Karl Marx University in Leipzig began a series on REDABAS, the GDR’s relational database system, which the course described as compatible with dBASE II. From February 1988 a team from Wilhelm Pieck University in Rostock, led by Professor Bernd-Georg Münzer, ran a course on the K 1810 WM86, a Soviet chip that MP’s articles paired with Intel’s 8086, covering its system chips, interrupts, assembly programming and coprocessors. Other courses taught Forth-83, Pascal and Turbo Pascal, and MACRO-SM, the macro assembler for the SM series of small computers that the Comecon countries built to a common design. A Lisp course was announced in 1990.
1990 in the masthead
In the February 1990 issue, written, as he said, “in December 1989”, Hans Weiß looked at what the political upheaval meant for the journal. “Almost nothing is as it was before October,” he wrote. The print run, he said, had always been “well over 50,000 copies”. MP had depended on the state news agency ADN for its news pages, and he pinned “great hopes” on an expected media law, so that it would no longer be necessary to strip the whitewash out of success reports. Advertisements from the West were starting to appear in the East German press; MP would not sacrifice its few pages to them unless readers could see the money improving the magazine.
He also announced an agreement with c’t, the West German computer magazine published by Heise, to take its articles. The first two appeared in the March issue, along with an “East–West contact exchange” run jointly by the two magazines: East German readers filled in a questionnaire and c’t matched them by computer with West German pen-friends who shared their interests. From the May issue MP also reprinted articles from Computer Persönlich, published by Markt & Technik.
The colophon tracked the changes. From the February issue, licence 1710 was credited to the government’s press and information service, not the press office of the Council of Ministers, by October the line read simply “Lizenz-Nr. 1710”, and from November it was gone. “VEB”, the prefix of a state-owned enterprise, was gone from the publisher’s name by April, and from August the publisher was Verlag Technik GmbH. In June the editors promised readers they had no plans to change the price, noting that MP, as a new title in 1987, had been “allowed” a realistic one, unlike many older GDR magazines. From the July issue, the first after the GDR adopted the Deutschmark on 1 July 1990, the cover price was 5 DM. By November, after German unification, the address read “O-1020 Berlin”.
The December 1990 issue still looked ahead, listing articles prepared for issue 1/1991 on object-oriented programming, Clipper 5.0, 386SX PCs and DR DOS 5.0. Public archives of the magazine stop with that issue, and the public sources do not record when it finally closed.
Sources
- Mikroprozessortechnik issue 1/1987, colophon and contents (p. 1): full title, ISSN, publisher, editors and advisory board, licence number, press date, price and foreign subscription agents; contents including the U5200, IRTS 8000, SM 52/12, KC 87 and the first MP-Kurs on C.
- Felix Meier, “Mikroelektronik — Schlüsseltechnologie für die dynamische Entwicklung unserer Volkswirtschaft”, Mikroprozessortechnik issue 1/1987, p. 2.
- Mikroprozessortechnik annual index for 1987 (pages 1–384), and the colophons of issues 1–3/1988 (change of responsible editor).
- Mikroprozessortechnik 1987, news item naming the K 1810 WM86 as a “UdSSR-Schaltkreis”; articles the same year writing “K 1810 WM 86 (I8086)”.
- Thomas Horn, “Programmieren mit MACRO-SM (Teil I)”, Mikroprozessortechnik (MP-Kurs): MACRO-SM as the assembler of the Comecon small-computer system (SKR), SM3 and SM4.
- “REDABAS: Arbeit mit Datenbanken (Teil I)”, Thilo Wetter and Matthias Donner, Mikroprozessortechnik 1987, p. 239.
- “Mikroprozessorsystem K 1810 WM86: Hardware – Software – Applikation (Teil 1)”, Bernd-Georg Münzer and others, Mikroprozessortechnik issue 2/1988, p. 44.
- Hans Weiß, editorial, Mikroprozessortechnik issue 2/1990, p. 34: “im Dezember 1989”, the print run, ADN, Western advertising and the c’t agreement.
- Mikroprozessortechnik issue 3/1990: editorial note on the first c’t reprints and the East–West contact exchange (pp. 95–96).
- Mikroprozessortechnik issue 5/1990, contents page: the agreement with Computer Persönlich; issue 6/1990, p. 161: the editors’ note on the price and the reader survey.
- Mikroprozessortechnik colophons, issues 1–12/1990: the licence line, the publisher’s name, the price in marks and then Deutschmarks, and the “O-1020 Berlin” address; issue 12/1990, preview of issue 1/1991.
- “Verlag Technik”, German Wikipedia (web, secondary): conversion of VEB Verlag Technik into a GmbH on 1 July 1990. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlag_Technik
- ISSN Portal, record 0233-2892 (web, secondary). https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0233-2892
See also
- Bajtek: Poland’s state-launched computer monthly, aimed at the young rather than at engineers
- Soviet computing
- The C64 across borders