Your Commodore | Code Like It's 198x

The first Your Commodore, dated October 1984, cost 80p and promised relief to anyone who found machine code too much: “Games and utilities to type in”, a BASIC tutorial series, adventure help in “Tales from the Crypt”, and a review of Commodore’s CBM 8296 business computer. Argus Specialist Publications aimed it at the whole Commodore range, from the VIC-20 to the office machines, and filled it with programs for readers to type in.

It lasted seven years and changed a good deal on the way. In 1985 it swallowed a rival, Your 64. In 1990 it became YC, a games magazine with a cassette on the cover, and that summer Argus sold it to a small publisher in Milton Keynes. The last issue anyone has found, dated October 1991, called itself “Britain’s longest running C64 mag”.

Fast facts

Publisher: Argus Specialist Publications, London and later Hemel Hempstead, from October 1984; Alphavite Publications, Milton Keynes, from August 1990.
Run: October 1984 to October 1991, monthly, with no July 1990 issue; 84 issues in all.
Price: 80p at launch; £1.00 by November 1985; £1.95 with a cassette by January 1990.
Editors: Wendy J Palmer (launch), Stuart Cooke (from October 1985), Rik Henderson (from September 1989), Jeff Davy (from mid-1991).
Machines: VIC-20, Commodore 64 and 128, C16 and Plus/4, with some Amiga coverage; YC was for the C64 and C128 only.
Sister titles: Commodore Disk User (from November 1987), Your Amiga.

Launched out of another magazine

Argus tried the idea out first. In July 1984 it gave away a Your Commodore supplement with Personal Computing Today, one of its existing magazines. The supplement carried VIC-20 and CBM 64 programs and software reviews, edited by Paul Liptrot, with Wendy Palmer as group editor and Ron Harris as managing editor.

Three months later the magazine appeared on its own, with Palmer as “Launch Editor” and Harris still managing editor, at Argus’s offices at No. 1 Golden Square in London. It went on sale on the first Friday of each month. By March 1985 Kevin Cox was deputy editor, and by July Palmer had become group editor.

Argus and its staff

Argus published a stable of specialist magazines, and computing was only part of it. The October 1984 issue carried an advertisement for another Argus product, 64 Tape Computing, a cassette sold every other month in WH Smith and Menzies. Rik Henderson, who edited YC at the end of the decade, later recalled that Argus was “a firm more renowned for its caravanning magazines and the like”, so the computer titles “always stuck out like a sore thumb”.

Stuart Cooke became editor with the October 1985 issue and stayed with the magazine for most of its life. In November 1985 the masthead listed Cooke as editor, Marie Curry as assistant editor, Dave Bradshaw as group editor and Wendy Palmer as group managing editor. Cooke also launched Commodore Disk User for Argus in 1987, and he was still on the masthead as consultant editor after the magazine changed hands in 1990.

Your 64

Your 64 was a rival from a different publisher. Sportscene Specialist Press, of 14 Rathbone Place in London, launched it in May 1984 as Your 64 & VIC 20, and its fourteenth issue was dated October 1985. The next month’s Your Commodore carried “Now Incorporating Your 64” across its cover, and the masthead read “Your Commodore incorporating Your 64” for years afterwards.

Readers noticed. A letter in January 1986 recalled Cooke’s promise in November that, “having joined forces with Your 64”, the magazine would bring them “the best Commodore magazine around”. Another, headed “Merger Moans”, came from a former Your 64 buyer who was “deeply shocked” to find no hints, cheats, POKEs or software chart, and “most of the pages … given up to listings”.

Listings first

The listings were the point. The magazine told the Your 64 reader that “we devote a large number of pages to listings” because “most of our programs are of commercial quality”, and that it printed both a loader and the assembly code for machine-code programs so readers could “follow the program through and find out how it works”. It would not print game POKEs: “Surely the whole point of buying a game is to try and solve the puzzles that the programmer of the game has set?” The November 1985 issue began a type-in macro assembler, Mach 1, and ran a BASIC extension package in parts. For the type-in culture of the time, see that entry.

Typing them in was still hard work, and in October 1986 the magazine offered a way out. Its software service sold each month’s C64 and C128 programs on one cassette for £4.00 or on disk for £6.00. The magazine admitted that its programs were long, “thus taking longer to type in and more room for errors”, but insisted that “all of the listings in Your Commodore are taken straight from a printout of working programs”.

A year later Argus went further. Commodore Disk User, launched with a November/December 1987 issue at £2.50, came with the programs already on a 5¼-inch disk. It was edited by Cooke and badged “from the publishers of Your Commodore”. See Disk magazines.

Every Commodore

The magazine covered whatever Commodore sold. It reported the British launch of the C16 and Plus/4 in December 1984, and in November 1985 it examined both the Commodore 128 and “The Amiga Unveiled”. In June 1986 it announced the Commodore Show at the Novotel in Hammersmith, “featuring the UK launch of the fabulous Amiga”. In January 1988 a separate Your Amiga supplement came with the magazine, and Your Amiga later became a sister title of its own.

YC

The magazine changed course in September 1989, when Rik Henderson arrived and wrote that the team had decided “to offer a brighter future for YC”. That issue was built around the Batman film. By then Argus had moved the magazine to Argus House in Hemel Hempstead. In January 1990 the cover title became YC, with “Your Commodore — the fun magazine” in a strip above it. The issue cost £1.95, and a cassette with four free games was taped to the front. Henderson later said that the old magazine had been “mainly a serious magazine with listings and articles about home working”, and that after the change “our sales improved greatly”.

Alphavite

In the summer of 1990 Argus let the magazine go. The August 1990 issue opened by asking readers whether they had noticed “something was missing in your lives for just one month”: there was no July issue. “Go and look at the masthead,” Henderson wrote, “… no more Hemel Hempstead … hello Milton Keynes, and hello new publisher.” YC now came from Alphavite Publications, at 20 Potters Lane, Kiln Farm, Milton Keynes, with Hasnain Walji as publisher, Henderson as editor and Cooke as consultant editor. Commodore Disk User moved to Alphavite at the same time. In Henderson’s account, Argus had “decided to close its computer mags entirely in the summer of 1990”, and Alphavite, “another small company up the road”, bought them to continue them.

In May 1991 Henderson said goodbye in a news-page column headed “GOODBYEEE!!!”. He was leaving to edit the sister magazine Your Amiga, and handed YC to its contributing editor, Jeffrey Davy. The October 1991 issue was a “Fantastic new-look issue”, with Final Fight and Last Battle on the cover and four complete games on the tape. Davy was editor and Henderson group editor. No later issue is known.

Later history

Henderson later recalled that Alphavite “ended up going bankrupt”. He and Davy tried to buy the Your Commodore name from the administrator, who “wanted too much”, so they started again. With a partner, they launched Commodore Power, dated January 1992, which Henderson called “a direct replacement for YC”. “So YC lasted until October 1991,” he wrote. Scans of both magazines are now on the Internet Archive.

Sources

Your Commodore supplement, free with Personal Computing Today, July 1984: masthead (Paul Liptrot, Ron Harris, Wendy Palmer); VIC-20 and CBM 64 programs.
Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 1, October 1984: cover (80p; “Games and utilities to type in”); p. 4, masthead (“Launch Editor: Wendy J Palmer”; Ron Harris; Jim Connell; No. 1 Golden Square; the first Friday of each month); p. 69, 64 Tape Computing advertisement.
Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 6, March 1985, and vol. 1 no. 10, July 1985: mastheads (Kevin Cox, deputy editor; Wendy J. Palmer, group editor).
Your Commodore vol. 2 no. 1, October 1985: masthead (Stuart Cooke, editor).
Your Commodore vol. 2 no. 2, November 1985: cover (“Now Incorporating Your 64”, £1.00); p. 3, contents and masthead (Cooke, Marie Curry, Dave Bradshaw, Wendy Palmer; “The C128 — in Depth”, “The Amiga Unveiled”, Mach 1).
Your Commodore vol. 2 no. 4, January 1986, p. 57: letters (“Stay Sharp”, “Merger Moans” and the magazine’s replies).
Your Commodore vol. 2 no. 9, June 1986: masthead (“Your Commodore incorporating Your 64”). The Commodore Show and the Amiga launch: see the Commodore Amiga entry.
Your Commodore vol. 3 no. 1, October 1986, p. 72: “Software for Sale” (tape £4.00, disk £6.00).
Your Commodore, December 1984: the C16 and Plus/4 launch; see the Commodore 16 entry. Your Amiga supplement, January 1988.
Commodore Disk User vol. 1 no. 1, November/December 1987: cover (£2.50; “From the publishers of Your Commodore”); p. 3, masthead (Stuart Cooke, editor; bi-monthly).
Your 64 & VIC 20 no. 1, May 1984, and Your 64 no. 14, October 1985: Sportscene Specialist Press, 14 Rathbone Place.
Your Commodore, September 1989, p. 4: editorial (Rik Henderson) and masthead (Stuart Cooke, group editor; Argus House, Hemel Hempstead; “Your Commodore incorporating Your 64”).
YC, January 1990: cover (YC, “Your Commodore — the fun magazine”, £1.95, “4 free games”).
YC, August 1990, p. 3: masthead (Alphavite Publications, Milton Keynes; Hasnain Walji; Rik Henderson; Stuart Cooke, consultant editor) and editorial (“we missed a month”).
YC, May 1991, p. 6: “GOODBYEEE!!!” (Henderson to Your Amiga; Jeff Davy) and masthead.
YC, October 1991: cover (“Britain’s longest running C64 mag!!!”); p. 4, contents and masthead (Jeff Davy, editor; Rik Henderson, group editor).
Commodore Disk User, 1990–91: mastheads (Alphavite Publications).
Rik Henderson, “How we made Commodore Power magazine”, Commodore Format Archive (web, secondary): the move to games and the rise in sales, Argus’s caravanning titles and the closure of its computer division, Alphavite’s bankruptcy, the attempt to buy the name, Commodore Power; “So YC lasted until October 1991”. https://commodoreformatarchive.com/rik-henderson-how-we-made-commodore-power-magazine/
“Your Commodore”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): 84 issues, October 1984 to October 1991, citing the Internet Archive’s scans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Commodore