The History Of The Midnite Software Gazette
MY PERSONAL VIEW By Jim Oldfield, Jr.
This is the second and final installment of Jim's history of the Midnite Software Gazette.
COPY ME. I WANT TO TRAVEL!
With the decision made to print a user group publication, Jim Strasma and 1 took the route most user groups take and started with a newsletter--all four pages worth! (Photocopying was inexpensive back then.) Our first mailing was to all the people we knew in the PET community, plus as many user groups as we could find. TPUG (the Toronto PET Users' Group) hadn't started printing a formal newsletter at the time, so we got together with them to help spread the word about Midnite by allowing them to reprint our issues. To defray the costs of postage, we asked people to send us
If you're a regular Midnite reader and you miss the writers you're used to seeing in the pages of Midnite, be sure to read Robert Baker's review of the MicroTroll elsewhere in this issue. We promise many more reviews by other Midnite regulars in the issues to come.
-Mark & Benn stamped self-addressed envelopes that we could, in turn, mail back to them as an issue was completed.
We decided to print four times a year—we weren't sure if people would take to Midnite. Jim Strasma's first Midnite editorial stated our goals:
"Welcome to the MIDNITE SOFTWARE GAZETTE, an off-the-wall publication of the Central Illinois PET Users. (PET is a trademark of Commodore Business Machines, Inc.) It is our attempt to fill the vacuum in PET reviews since the PET GAZETTE folded a year ago. Until then, nearly every available PET program was reviewed quickly. Since, lots of PET programs have been offered for sale, but very few are reviewed. Some of the new programs are VERY expensive. Who wants to spend $100+ on a program that may be junk? Who are we to do the reviews?...Just PET owners with lots of software. JS has written some published reviews. The rest have other writing experience. Between us, we have all models and varieties of PET equipment, except the 8032. We want PETdom to prosper. Good software will help. We will point you to it, and steer you away from trash."
Almost prophetic, eh? To this day, Midnite has upheld this basic philosophy. With INFO the tradition continues.
On the bottom of that first issue and continuing through issue seven we had a slogan that became literally world famous: "Copy Me. I want to travel." And copy it, people did. After only a few issues we had garnered readers in forty-plus states and twelve countries—all this based on a simple principle of short, concise,
continued on page 79...
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