Liverpool Software Gazette

Liverpool Software Gazette

Liverpool Software Gazette - First Edition - November 1979
Publisher	Microdigital
First issue	November 1979
Final issue — Number	February 1981 8

Liverpool Software Gazette was a short-lived computer magazine published by Microdigital, a company who were based in Liverpool, England and run by Bruce Everiss.

The magazine ran to only eight issues of which the last was a double. Issues were bi-monthly from November 1979 to February 1981 though the last was actually dated February/April 1981. Initially costing 50p the price increased to 75p by the fifth edition while the final double edition cost £1.50. The page count started at around 50 though by the fifth edition had reached 100 pages.

The pressure of running both Microdigital and the magazine soon took its toll on the company, and the magazine was put up for sale during the final edition. It was sold to and incorporated into an Apple magazine where all non-Apple content was immediately dropped.

The magazine was not for the computer newbie and tackled a wide range of subjects from languages, machine code and CPUs, systems (both large and small), games, programming techniques, astronomy. In many cases the articles went far deeper than those normally tackled by the computer magazines of the day.

There were some regular columns such as Pets Corner (for the Commodore PET), Apple Pips (for the Apple II), Nascom Notes and Nybbles (small BASIC tips and routines).

Below are some of the contents from each of the issues. Note the general term for computers back then was Microcomputers (sometimes spelt as two words). In some cases the original spelling/typos have been left intact.

Issue 1:

Issue 2:

Issue 3:

Issue 4:

Issue 5:

Issue 6 (Pascal special):

Issue 7 (CP/M special):

Issue 8/9:

The article in issue number 4, "Architectural software on the cheap" was contributed by Paul Coates, then working in the School of Architecture at Liverpool Polytechnic. In the opinion of the author, this was one of the earliest examples of the serious use of cheap micros for CAD. In those days the conventional wisdom was that CAD required a much larger computer and expensive graphics hardware. The article illustrated the use of the relatively cheap combination of a PET micro and an A3 plotter for generating floor plans, shadow casting and daylight calculation. The work illustrated was funded by a small RIBA (The Royal Institute of British Architects) grant for teaching architecture using computers.

The article on TCL Pascal in issue 6 was by Anne Scott and John Stout.