Magazines of Yesteryear - Computer Shopper Issue 40 - June 1991

The summer of 1991 - what a time to be alive! If you were a kid, you had the joys of listening to "Do The Bartman" and "The Stonk" (Jesus F-ing wept), while adults got all concerned by Color Me Badd singing "I Want To Sex You Up' - truly a more innocent time. Cinema screens were playing the likes of Highlander II (yep, it really was that bad), Misery and the Alan Rickman classic, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But you're not here for that malarkey. You're here to see what really cool stuff Computer Shopper 40 had in store. Well, like Color Me Badd, they had SX on the brain.

Like the computers of the time, even the magazine is beige.

386SX, but SX nonetheless (much cleaner than any 16/32-bit joke I could think of...), with thirteen of the chunky blighters lined up to demonstrate what super cool technological beasts they were. Being Computer Shopper though meant there was much, much more, with some Smalltalk before getting you SQL-ing. Oh-err missus! Maybe not so innocent a time...

Before we get to the contents, let us first consider the publication itself. It cost a measly 99p, which works out at around £2.15 today - for 400 (count 'em) pages! Okay, it's not all editorial content - this is Shopper after all, and there are adverts a plenty (the first 110 pages almost completely so), but a lot has changed in thirty years. Speaking of which...

Contents page including the oh-so handy format specific list.

1991 was the year the 386 processor really hit the mainstream as the older 286 became pretty much the "budget" processor option and the rise of Windows 3.0 (priced at £80 by some PC manufacturers because not everyone supplied their machines with Windows as standard. Not yet anyway.) demanded a 386 for a truly (then modern) GUI (Graphical User Interface) experience - fans of the Mac, ST, Amiga and Archimedes can rightly laugh until it hurts at this point. Incidentally, those systems were catered for with specific columns for their machines and, in this particular issue, a piece on expanding the Amiga. In a nice touch, there's a reference guide so you can see which articles may relate to your format of choice. 

My, how newsagents have changed...

Starting with the news (page 112 onwards), the first big piece is about Psion's upmarket handheld, the HC. These were a return to speciality market's rather than the consumer one, and they did pretty well as you'd expect from Psion of the time. Amstrad's decision to cease manufacturing of the by then venerable PC1512 and 1640 models, as well as discount the backside of the ill-fated 2000-series meant there were many a bargain available for canny shoppers. Dell offering of a compact 486 raised some eyebrows, as did the price (£2,799 ex VAT), although they had discounted the existing 486-based 425TE from £8,099 to £5,549 ex. so that's alright then... Mannesmann Tally announced cheaper colour printing, with a Thermal Transfer Printer for under £2k!!! I'll have two, thank you, whilst IBM UK were upset at profits warnings after the sales failure of the PS/1 and 2 ranges. Shame. 

Oh, and before I forget, the subscription card is distinctly of its time...

Sandwiched between the news and the notebook group test is a page on Hewlett Packard's latest portable handheld computer, the 95LX. With built in Lotus 1-2-3 and an almost CGA compatible screen, this pint-sized pocket wonder could last for up to 60 hours, which was handy, as by the time you'd bought the device (£449) and the additional extras, (another £350 or so), you'd have precious little cash left for batteries. Still, it was a fantastic little gizmo. 

Good old specification table.

The big group test covers the 386SX portable market, with thirteen machines come under the microscope. Remember Arche? ITS? Ness? Reeves? Nope. Nor should you, as these companies are long gone. Back in '91, they would sell you a variation on the laptop theme with piss-poor ergonomics and shite battery lives, but they were reasonably powerful and they could be moved around without inducing a hernia. Honestly, if you've never lugged an Amstrad PPC, you've never lived! The cheapest rocked up at £1,499, the most expensive at £3,395. Weight for most hovered around the 6-7lbs mark, screens reaching 8 inches in the diagonal and with resolutions set firmly at 640x480. Claimed battery lives were between two and six hours. DOS 3.3 or 4.01 was the standard OS, while some also included Windows - and remember, this is Windows at VGA resolution on an 8 inch passive matrix screen. What a time to have shares in an opticians!

When an 8086 could (just) about see you through the day.

Speaking of which, here is a feature on Virtuality, a British-designed VR system that found brief success both in arcades and on TV (Cyberzone, hosted by Craig Charles - and yes, it's as period as you can guess), before disappearing into the mists of time, leaving only vague recollections and a generation of people with permanent eye strain - more so than the laptop users.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try (and 30 plus years later), keep trying again!

The rest of the mag is a mix of articles and adverts (see the contents page above), so lets see what the latter have to offer. 

1991 was still the time of dealers and resellers, and 'Puters was having a great time flogging Amstrads and Olivettis to one and all. As you can see, the venerable 8086 was still an option, with a single drive mono display model coming in at £365 ex VAT. The "portable" (cough!) PPC ranges were still around, as were clearance PC1640's, although the price on application notice seems more of a warning sign than anything else. Noticeably, an equivalent Olivetti machine, the PCS 86, was about a hundred quid more, and thus the appeal of Alan's kit can be surmised - unless it was the much-maligned 2000 series, whose special offer prices here are rather tasty (and yes, by this point, they had sorted the reliability issues out... mostly). Of course, whether you wanted an 8086 machine in 1991 was a different question - Windows 3 was a thing and 3.1 was just round the corner. Also of note is the price of printers - your basic 9-pin dot matrix item could be had for just over a ton, but if you wanted a laser printer, well, they cost more than the computer you'd be using it with! Base models around £700, but after that, a grand plus was the minimum. 

Don't laugh! In 1991, a 16MHz 286 would see you right. Not sure about the  £2k plus 486 mentioned on the right mind...

Ah, Reeves, selling direct to the customer, and with non too shabby prices either. Your base machine was a 286 running at 12MHz, although that really was the bottom end of the market by then, and if you wanted Super VGA colour graphics (1024x768 tech fans), it could be yours for £799 ex VAT. Being a PC, if you wanted the monitor to actually support that resolution and not bugger your eyes up, that added two hundred quid to the total. 386's in SX flavours could be had for just under a grand, but after that, the sky was the limit. A CD equipped 386SX 20MHz creeps in at £1,699 - and no, I don't see why you'd buy it with a mono monitor either. 

Here's Viglen, who became a prominent manufacturer until purchased by Amstrad much later on in the decade. Their prices weren't too daft, although they really did fancy those tiny desktop cases on the lower end machines. 

Watford Electronics, familiar to many for their general range of computing goodies, were prolific with their Aries range of machines - and again, although the prices are not silly, offering an EGA option in 1991 was stupid, especially when the difference in price between that and VGA was only £50.

I miss the green adverts of Watford Electronics. 

Computers By Post was another dealer, also selling software too, and it's here you'll see a big change compared to the way things are (mostly) done today. Every piece of software cost money back then (unless if was public domain or the introductory shareware version) and prices are... eye-opening. You'd like Word for Windows? £254 please. The latest version of Lotus 1-2-3 (a spreadsheet for those too young to remember)? £298. However, it is their cataloguing of software that really makes me shake my head. There is no way Autoroute (map and direction software) should be in the leisure category. No way at all!!! Still, you had the comfort that none of the packages sold here were those filthy grey imports from overseas...

Local software for local people, there'll be no trouble here!

This was very much a transitional period in the PC world. The older 8086 machines were on their way out as the 286 careened through the sweet spot of affordability (£500-£1,000) before its inevitable demise. A new processor generation, the shiny 386 was about to hold sway, albeit for barely two years, before the 486 stomped itself on the market. Similarly, the alternative formats were slowly fading, as both Atari and Commodore struggled to get their next generation machines to market - the Falcon was a 68030 beast but priced accordingly even as the parent company fizzled back into the console market before carking it, whereas Commodore finally boosted the Amiga with the A1200/A4000 and the AGA chipset, arguably two years too late and anyway, the corporate behaviour of the exec team was going to catch up with the once global behemoth eventually. The Mac, well, Apple were about to pull a Classic (see what I did there?), rehashing eight year old tech into budget machines, although their long term prospects were hampered by the end of the roadmap for the 680x0 processor architecture (which they neatly avoided), and an increasingly stale operating system (which they didn't, at least not until far worse events were to hammer the company). Acorn? Well, they had the new ARM 3 chip, the forthcoming ARM250 (a system on a chip design long before the concept became popular) and would, by some magic of accounting, stay with the computing world until 1998. 

Fin

I leave you then with the final page of Shopper 40. Naturally, this is Zygote and the sublime "Great Moments in Computing" by Croucher and Evans. There has never been a better way to close an issue of any computing magazine. 

Next time: Shopper 80 and October 1994!

Why have you bought that tat? - Computing magazines, purpose and posts

As someone with an interest in history, the importance of primary sources, contemporary to the events of which they describe, cannot be overstated. The same can, should and will be said (by me) for the history of computing.

MacUser(s) always wanted to show off!

I have an interest in the topic, one that stretches from the earliest years to about the beginning of the 2010's. Over the last few years, I've managed to acquire a selection of pdf's for magazines such as Acorn User, Amiga Format, The One, a decent range of Computer and Video Games, and so forth. However, an area that remains somewhat incomplete is the UK general computing genre. 

You can, for instance, collect quite a few Personal Computer World pdf's from Archive.org, and many an enterprising eBayer will sell you DVD's with these collated for a few quid. The pdf collection of Personal Computer News, a fortnightly mag from the early to mid 1980's is a treasure trove of machines, news and reviews. The thing is, that without access to these long out of print titles, much of that history would be lost. The problem is actually worse for the period that most fascinates me, the mid 80's to mid-90's.

Over this ten year period, the 16, 26 (good old Archie) and 32-bit machines arrived and, in the end, became dominant in the form of the Windows PC and Mac (albeit with the latter having a torrid time). Yet whilst there are any number of format specific mags available in pdf collections, the likes of Computer Shopper are almost totally missing, and neither love, money or entreaties of personal fealty will get you an early PC Pro. And as for 1990's PC Format, jog on, bonny people. 

You DO NOT want to know the postage on these two batches!

Still, through the joys of eBay, I have managed to create a collection of What Micro and Which Computer from the 80-90's period, as well as a smattering of PCW's that aren't around as pdf's. As much as I would love a full collection of period PCW or PC Pro's, the Holy Grail remains Computer Shopper. I have issue 4, covered here, and recently picked up issues 40 (June 1991) and 80 (October 1994).

Why, you may ask? Well, much like contemporary sources serve any historical wargamer well (hearing it in the words of those who were there gives, at the very least, flavour to the period, never mind facts, opinions and the like), for the history of computing in the UK, the equivalent of these primary sources are the magazines of the time. 

Let me demonstrate with a couple of photographs. Below you will see the three physical issues of Computer Shopper I own, as well as the eleven PCW's. Note how they change, oldest at the bottom of their respective piles - they get bigger, and in the case of Shopper, much bigger!

What a difference six years makes.

Are you surprised? It did advertise itself as a journal...

I'll cover these changes in greater details in future posts, but what I'd like to point out is that the computer scene back in the early 1990's was an absolute riot of manufacturers, suppliers and resellers. The sheer variety of kit and software available is mind boggling, especially when compared to the mature, staid and much changed, online dominated market now. 

Without physical copies of these magazines, there is little online evidence, aside from the odd image an wikipedia entry, that this even happened. Having written a piece that should be published later this year on Amstrad's attempts at gaming-focused PC's, it would have been extremely difficult to research such an article without having some of the paper issues of mags long past. Similarly, you get a feel for the period. Going back further than the 90's, you'd think the 8-bit UK computer market in the early 80's was a three way between Amstrad, Commodore and Sinclair (alphabetical order to annoy at least some of the fans) with a few failed formats like the Enterprise, Ace and Lynx. Except it wasn't - it was the Wild West, with scare stories of Japanese competitors (this being the time of the fear of Far Eastern superiority in high tech industries) driving editorials in Personal Computer News, alongside reports of Sinclair's prickly nature, the omnipotency of CP/M, and the constant news reports of computer companies being torn a new one by the Advertising Standards Agency. This is stuff is long forgotten yet is key to understanding why things happened the way they did - and how commentators back then failed to realise how much the US market would drive the home computer revolution in to the 90's - seriously, once the IBM Compatible ensconced itself as the defacto home computer in the States, everybody else's (excluding Apple, eventually), time would be limited. 

As a source of information, be it news, reviews or opinion pieces, or imagery (especially adverts - what have we lost with the decline of print ads - looking at you, Gateway 2000 and MJN - you'll see why when we get to the Shopper 80!), these are a goldmine and, in my humble opinion, should be preserved however possible. 

It's not just the general computing publications either. MacUser, of which I own three issues, is another, and there may be a piece about 1995 coming at some point, as that was the year that things started to fall apart for our fruity little tinkers in Cupertino - as far as hardware goes. The OS was looking very tired against the behemoth that would become Windows 95, and Apple were already half way up the creek when it came to sorting a replacement. 

Similarly, this wonderful screenshot from an Acorn User issue in 1992 and the last paragraph talking about the benefits of getting an A3010 over an Amiga A500 or A500 Plus... as a valid comment, not really, as flavour, hell yes!

The comment in column two: meow, pussycat, MEOW!

Anyway, long post short (too late!), there will be a new series of occasional posts looking at specific issues of computer magazines past, starting with Shopper 40. Much like "Was That Film Really That Bad', they'll happen as and when, but as you can see from the pictures above, there are a few editions to get through... and maybe more if eBay continues to be a friend...

If you're more into video games coverage, check out the Out of Print Archive here, who have a cracking (and growing collection) of high quality magazines scans. 

Homebrew Game Development and the Extra Lives of Consoles by Robin Wilde - Book Review

What, you may ask, does it mean when someone describes a video game as a homebrew development? Well, here is the perfect volume for you as Robin Wilde provides not only the answer to that question, but also an in-depth history to that little talked about corner of the video games industry where, officially, these titles don't exist.

Throughout the 170 pages or so of yet another top quality White Owl publication, Wilde takes the reader by the hand and explains exactly what homebrew games are, where they come from and why they are an important part of video games culture. He breaks their history up into four periods, a pre-history (1950's to about 1980), the First Open Period (roughly 1980-91), the Closed Period (1991 to 2004) and the Second Open Period (2004 onwards), each period defined by the technology that was released to market, it's accessibility and its complexity. 

And there is some complexity, evidenced by the introduction that takes up the first twenty or so pages. This is a subject that requires explanation with subtlety and nuance, and demands the reader pay attention. Sure, the later chapters featuring specific titles for the various platforms do feel like your usual games round up, but don't let the format of this tome fool you - there are some very hefty points of discussion included. 

Where specific titles are covered, there is a balance to the criticism provided, as these games are unofficial in nature. That talented developers, both professional and amateur, have managed to achieve so much with many an older console format is to be applauded, and Wilde does that very well indeed. The added benefit here is that the reader can check out these games themselves, and so judge whether the author's points are valid with their own experience. 

When it comes to the consoles, there is little left uncovered, as not only do the familiar favourites of the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, PC Engine and others of similar vintage warrant inclusion, but handhelds and less successful home machines (Jaguar, 3DO and Neo Geo) also make an appearance. Indeed, the homebrew scene around the various models of Game Boy is huge, pushing the technical boundaries of the hardware in a way very similar to the manner in which demoscene coders pushed the 16-bit home computers. 

There's a focus on the tools used within the scene, as well as the hardware that really failed yet still garnered some attention - the Tiger Game.com, the Bandai Wonderswan and the Gizmondo all appear. The inclusion of the Cybiko was a blast from the past - Phones 4u tried to sell these some twenty years ago and they were as popular as you'd expect - plus the profit margin on them was terrible. 

The author discusses the changes to the scene as the years have passed, as machines became more powerful and the use of 3D graphics hit the mainstream market. This culminates in the chapter detailing the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, and the potential decline in homebrew efforts for later consoles. 

Fortunately, this book doesn't end on a low, as the final two chapters look at what the steps you can take if you want to make your own homebrew games, as well as the possible future of the scene. Some useful footnotes and bibliography add to the resources for potential 'brewers.

Once again, White Owl have published a well written and timely tome on a niche but very interesting subject within the wider scope of video games. If your interests lie in Indie/Homebrew development, there is much to interest you here. If you're a complete novice on the subject, I can think of no better place to start. As always, you can pick up a copy of this excellent guide at most physical bookshops (or get them to order it in), as well as the usual online sources and direct from the publisher here. You can follow the author on Twitter here.