Return Of The Shrewd

He’s back! David Robinson puts finger to keyboard once more and looks at how much has changed over the past 30 years – and how much has stayed the same

WELL, HELLO THERE. Like some grisly combination of a boomerang, a bad penny and Terminator, I’m back! Albeit just for this 30th anniversary issue.

While preparing for the dreadful ritual of sitting down before a blank screen desperately thinking up what to write, I unearthed the first issue to grace my presence, number 5 (August 1988), and a special 10th anniversary supplement to issue 121. Preserving relics such as these is useful in sharpening the perspective you get on the history and development of the PC in this country, and the best magazine that reports on it all.

Issue 5 had 128 pages, was 98% monochrome and cost 78p. Ten years later, issue 121 had an asking price of £2.25, for which you got over 1,000 pages and a CD full of free software; some useful and some just fluff. It was almost as though the magazine was physically mirroring the performance progress of the machines we were writing about.

PRIME TIME

In one sense a PC from 1988 was a pretty primitive thing. The cheapest offered in issue 5’s adverts cost £385 plus VAT (most prices were quoted without the twisted tax to make them look more attractive). For this, you got Amstrad’s build quality, a lowly Intel 8088 CPU, a monochrome monitor, 512KB of memory and a floppy disk drive that would hold as much as 1MB.