Your Spectrum was a British magazine for ZX Spectrum owners, published from January 1984 to December 1985 by Sportscene Specialist Press from 14 Rathbone Place in London. It ran for 21 issues and then changed its name: the same editor and publisher, at the same address, carried on in January 1986 as Your Sinclair. The famous joke-filled YS of the later 1980s started out as something quite different, a magazine of machine code, hardware projects and programming, whose cover slogan was “Byte High, No Limit”.
Beyond basics
The first issue cost 95p and promised to be bi-monthly, with the second due in the first week of February 1984. Its editor, Bruce Sawford, wrote that the Spectrum was no longer new, but that its owners were growing up with it: Your Spectrum was “for those who are eager to step beyond basics”, and if some of the content seemed “a bit tricky to some of you — tough, that’s what progress is all about!” The cover offered a hardware upgrade, a do-it-yourself keyboard buffer and “a Toni Baker exclusive” on machine code.
From the second issue Roger Munford was editor. From the third, Sawford was managing editor and the magazine was monthly, at 85p. The third issue also carried QL User inside, a section for Sinclair’s new QL. Regular contributors included Toni Baker, Simon Goodwin, Andrew Pennell and Ian Beardsmore, and by 1985 Peter Shaw ran a telephone helpline for readers on Wednesdays and Fridays.
The magazine’s most ambitious project was its own extended BASIC. In October 1984 it announced YS MegaBasic, “Mike Leaman’s long-time labour of love”: a machine-code program for the 48K Spectrum that added windows, sprites, sound effects, different character sizes and named procedures, and replaced the Spectrum’s one-key keyword entry with typing words letter by letter, which the magazine called “Speccy horror number one”. It left about 22K of memory free for programs. Readers who collected tokens from issues 8 and 9 could buy it for £7.95; in the shops, the magazine said, it would cost at least £9.95.
Towards games
By the summer of 1984 new games went before the Joystick Jury, a panel of reviewers for which the magazine also recruited computer clubs, and through 1985 the balance of the magazine shifted towards games. The price went back to 95p with the February issue. Kevin Cox became editor in the spring, with Munford moving up to managing editor and Peter Shaw as deputy, and the masthead began to fill with nicknames (“Editor Kevin Cock-Up”, “Deputy Editor Rocky Horror Shaw”). Readers who spotted the magazine’s mistakes won a “YS Trainspotter Award”. By August 1985 a reader survey listed “Megagame Reviews” as a section of the magazine, and the cover of that issue led on “The Megagame”.
The December 1985 issue, number 21, named Teresa Maughan as production editor and announced the change: “our name is changing to Your Sinclair. And that means the QL and 128K Spectrum get the YS treatment too!” A coupon for the newsagent said the first Your Sinclair would be on sale on 2 December 1985 “with a free game cassette on the front cover”. Your Sinclair began again at issue 1, dated January 1986, edited by Kevin Cox, from the same publisher at the same address, and ran until September 1993.
Sources
- Your Spectrum issue 1, January 1984: cover (95p, “Byte High, No Limit”, Toni Baker), Bruce Sawford’s editorial “What are we here for?”, and masthead (editor, publisher, bi-monthly schedule).
- Your Spectrum issues 2–4, 1984, mastheads: Roger Munford as editor, Bruce Sawford as managing editor from issue 3, monthly publication from issue 3; issue 3 cover (85p, “Inside QL User”).
- Your Spectrum issue 6, August 1984, contents (Joystick Jury); issue 7, September 1984: the call for clubs to take part.
- Your Spectrum issues 12–21, 1985: the YS Helpline (Peter Shaw).
- Your Spectrum issue 8, October 1984, p. 47: YS MegaBasic announced; issue 10, December 1984/January 1985, and issue 11, February 1985: the £7.95 offer and the £9.95 shop price.
- Your Spectrum issue 11, February 1985, cover (95p); issue 13, April 1985: “new editor Kevin Cox”; issues 14–17, May–August 1985, mastheads (Cox as editor, Munford as managing editor).
- Your Spectrum issue 16, July 1985: “The YS Trainspotter Award”; issue 17, August 1985: cover (“The Megagame”) and reader survey.
- Your Spectrum issue 21, December 1985: masthead, the change of name and the newsagent coupon.
- Your Sinclair issue 1, January 1986: statement of publication (see the Your Sinclair entry).
See also
- Your Sinclair: the same magazine under its new name, 1986–1993
- Teresa Maughan
- Sinclair User, CRASH: the other big Spectrum monthlies
- ZX Spectrum