''The Micro User'' (titled ''BBC Micro User'' in the first three issues) was a British specialist

magazine A magazine is a periodical literature, periodical publication, print or digital, produced on a regular schedule, that contains any of a variety of subject-oriented textual and visual content (media), content forms. Magazines are generally fin ...

catering to users of the

BBC Micro The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a family of microcomputers developed and manufactured by Acorn Computers in the early 1980s as part of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. Launched in December 1981, it was showcased across severa ...

computer series,

Acorn Electron The Acorn Electron (nicknamed the Elk inside Acorn and beyond) was introduced as a lower-cost alternative to the BBC Micro educational/home computer, also developed by Acorn Computers, to provide many of the features of that more expensive mach ...

Acorn Archimedes The Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems in this family use Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and initially ran the Arthur operating system, with later models ...

and, to a limited extent, the Cambridge Z88. It had a comprehensive mix of reviews of games, application software, and the latest

Acorn The acorn is the nut (fruit), nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera ''Quercus'', ''Notholithocarpus'' and ''Lithocarpus'', in the family Fagaceae). It usually contains a seedling surrounded by two cotyledons (seedling leaves), en ...

computers; type-in programs (duplicated on a " cover disk" which was available separately), a correspondence page offering help with computer problems, and approachable technical articles on programming and the BBC Micro's internals. The magazine hosted the long-running ''Body Building'' series by Mike Cook, in which each article introduced a small

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

project that could be built and connected to one of the BBC Micro's I/O ports. The project could be ordered in kit form or fully assembled, or the reader could source the parts and design as the articles contained a

circuit diagram A circuit diagram (or: wiring diagram, electrical diagram, elementary diagram, electronic schematic) is a graphical representation of an Electrical network, electrical circuit. A pictorial circuit diagram uses simple images of components, whil ...

. There were regular columns on adventure gaming from two successive contributors under the pseudonyms ''"

Alice Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...

through the VDU"'' and ''"The Mad Hatter"''. They reviewed the latest adventure releases for Acorn computers, offered hints to some games and scattered mathematical and logical puzzles in their articles. Another regular columnist, using the pen-name of ''"Hac-Man"'' (in reference to ''

Pac-Man ''Pac-Man,'' originally called in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The pla ...

'') set out cheats and compatibility fixes for popular arcade-style games, in the form of pokes or short type-in programs. Watford Electronics and Technomatic were prominent advertisers, taking out multi-page spreads in every issue in the mid 1980s. From October 1983 the magazine carried the first four issues of '' Electron User'' as a pull-out; this then split off into an independent publication.

Acorn Computing

With the October 1992 issue, the magazine was renamed ''Acorn Computing''. Each issue now came with a cover disc for use on RISC OS computers.Acorn Computing, October 1992, pg. 15

References

External links

Unofficial archive of The Micro User magazineThe Micro User Magazine @ Acorn Preservation Dot OrgThe Micro User Magazine @ The Centre for Computing History
Defunct computer magazines published in the United Kingdom Magazines established in 1983 Magazines disestablished in 1992 Magazines published in Manchester {{UK-sci-mag-stub

Acorn Computing

See also

References

External links