Compute!'s Gazette


Compute!'s Gazette, stylized as COMPUTE!'s Gazette was a computer magazine of the 1980s, directed at users of Commodore's 8-bit home computers. Announced as The Commodore Gazette, the Gazette was a Commodore-only daughter magazine of the computer hobbyist magazine Compute!. It was first published in July 1983.
Compute!'s Gazette contained both standard articles and type-in programs. Many of these programs were quite sophisticated and lengthy. To assist in entry, Gazette published several utilities. The Automatic Proofreader provided checksum capabilities for BASIC programs, while machine language listings could be entered with MLX. Starting in May 1984, a companion disk containing all the programs from each issue was available to subscribers for an extra fee. Perhaps Gazettes most popular and enduring type-in application was the SpeedScript word processor. A monthly column entitled The VIC Magician by Michael Tomczyk presented BASIC programming tips and tricks for the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64.
Gazette was reportedly profitable from its first issue, but towards the end of the 1980s, the magazine's size steadily decreased due to the increasing switch from 8-bit to 16-bit home computers. The last stand-alone issue of Compute!'s Gazette was published with cover date June 1990. At that point, the Compute! brand, including Gazette, was sold to the publishers of Omni and Penthouse. After a three-month publication hiatus, Gazette restarted publication, this time as an insert into the newly consolidated Compute rather than as a separate magazine. It continued in this vein until December 1993, after which it switched to a disk-only format. Due to the declining Commodore userbase, publication ceased entirely after February 12, 1995.