COMPUTE! Books for Z80 Computers?

[ballyalley]

COMPUTE! Books made many great books for the 6502-based computers back in the 1980's. These include books for the Atari, Apple and Commodore computers. Those books were great for people just learning (or, for me, were young kids at the time). Many of these books were compilations of articles from COMPUTE! or COMPUTE!'s Gazette magasine-- but not always. I've never seen a COMPUTE! book for any Z80 computers that deals with programming. Did such a book exist? What was it called?

 

Adam

[Nukey Shay]

The Speccy is a Z80. You could probably dig up some stuff here. Go hit the archives

[Nukey Shay]

Try this site for TRS80-specific stuff.

[ballyalley]

Try this site for TRS80-specific stuff.

 

Right. I know that there is quite a lot of Z80 information (including books) on the 'Net. I have my own fair share of these, in paper form (aka BOOKS), already. Still, for anyone looking for Z80 information, the TRS-80 and the Spectrum books can make great references. In many case though, especially with the Spectrum, these books usually make HEAVY use of the System ROM. I actually own some Spectrum ML books that use ONLY System Routines.

 

What I'm interested in specifically are books by COMPUTE!. These books were written in such a manner as to be very accessible, but also hold quite a bit of information. I'm not saying that other books are not accessible-- plenty of them are. I just have a soft spot in my heart for COMPUTE! books. I spent many days of my childhood typing in BASIC programs from these books for my Commodore 64. Later, in the early '90's, when I started collecting Atari computers (which I'd NEVER been exposed to before), I happened to get the five books by COMPUTE! which really set my mind ablaze. These were called:

 

COMPUTE!'s First Book of Atari

COMPUTE!'s Second Book of Atari

COMPUTE!'s Third Book of Atari

COMPUTE!'s First Book of Atari Graphics

COMPUTE!'s Second Book of Atari Graphics

 

These have all been archived and are available here:

 

http://www.atariarchives.org/

 

I didn't have access to the Internet in the early nineties (and didn't really know anything about it-- this was, I think the same year as the web was introduced). I learned through the than still published (and carried by my local bookstore), "Current Notes" magazine about the Atari Forums on GEnie. In there I learned about using my 1200 Baud modem to access it. Through trial and error (and a local Atari User Group), I managed to have a bit of fun on a machine that, even then, was considered quite obsolete. At the time Atari was considered old and dead, and not yet retro. The company hadn't released a game system since the 7800, and it didn't look like another one would REALLY get released.

 

Since access to the Internet wasn't available it could be quite difficult to learn about Atari computers. Those five COMPUTE! books, more than anything else, helped me learned about the Atari 800XL that I was collecting cartridges for. I had already grown up in the early eighties reading Compute! books and Compute's Gazette, so reading these five books just cemented the idea that COMPUTE! equals Great.

 

Nowadays I have the BallyAlley.com Bally/Astrocade website. That console uses the Z80. Over the years I've never seen anything by COMPUTE! about the Z80 (other than a non-programming "how to use CP/M" book), but COMPUTE! published hundreds of books and it's quite possible that I have just overlooked the book. I think that the chances are slim that such a book exists, as the Z80 never really caught on in computer here in the U.S. except in CP/M computers (and also for the Colecovision and Adam). The Z80 did much better overseas in the Spectrum and, of course, the Japanese MSX standard.

 

So... did COMPUTE! release some Z80-related books?

 

Adam

[carmel_andrews]

Apart from the TRS systems, i think the US market was mostly 8086/8 or 6502 dominated (till the 68k family came along), shame that the timex/sinclair tie up didn't succeed in the US, it might have given the z80 systems some much needed prominence compared to 6502 equivalents (either that or the msx family, which used a variant of the z80)

[Nukey Shay]

So... did COMPUTE! release some Z80-related books?

I don't think so. Butterfield and crew seemed to be more at home with the 6502-based systems...info pertaining to Z80 machines looked to die off in the early '80s (since the Z80 user base wasn't even close to 6502s' here in the states). So their readers should have been mostly 6502 disciples, as well (and that is where the collections and authors they published came from).

[Nukey Shay]

shame that the timex/sinclair tie up didn't succeed in the US

 

IMO Sinclair really dropped the ball on that one. The ZX had already been available in kit form for years before they decided to infiltrate the US market through their existing relationship with Timex...at a time that the market was getting flooded with orphan systems (most of which had user-attractable features like moving keys). It didn't help that the 1000s wobbly expansion RAM module made users afraid to touch the thing

[LoTonah]

I've been reading all of the Compute! PDFs, in chronological order. Although it was known as "The Journal For Progressive Computing", until the IBM came out in 1981 it really was just a 6502-based magazine. You'd read a little about the TS-1000, but the only non-6502 based computer that they covered for the first few years was the Radio Shack Color Computer.

 

There were a lot of books written for the Z80, just none by Compute!, and no books written in their "style", either.

[Nukey Shay]

You'd read a little about the TS-1000, but the only non-6502 based computer that they covered for the first few years was the Radio Shack Color Computer.

 

I think that might only be due to "legacy", in a sense. The Coco was the "affordable home computer" entry of the TRS-80 user base...which was already an established "big 5" computer (i.e. in use at businesses and schools - alongside IBM, Apple, Commodore, and Atari). No shortage of regular contributors to the magazine.

 

The Sinclair user base was the hobbiest in the U.S. (because you had to build 'em yourself).