About Ahoy!

Ahoy!

Ahoy! was an American computer magazine published monthly in New York City by Ion International from January 1984 to January 1989. It covered Commodore's color home computers — principally the Commodore 64, and later the Commodore 128 and the Amiga — in the years when the Commodore 64 was the best-selling home computer in the world. Its stock in trade was the type-in program: page after page of BASIC and machine language listings that readers keyed into their own machines by hand, supported by news, reviews, programming tutorials, readers' tips, and a suite of nautical-named departments that matched its title. Though its Wikipedia entry is brief, the full run of Ahoy! survives in scanned archives, and its mastheads and contents pages document in detail how a 1980s computer magazine served its readers.

The magazine's first issue appeared in January 1984, listing itself as published monthly by Ion International Inc. from 45 West 34th Street, Room 407, New York, New York, with twelve issues offered by subscription for fifteen dollars. Its stated mission, printed in that first issue, was to bring readers the latest news of what it called the Microcomputer Revolution as it related to their Commodore 64 — new hardware, new software, new ideas.

The type-in era

To understand Ahoy!, it is necessary to understand how software reached home computer owners in the mid-1980s. Downloads did not exist for most users, and boxed software was expensive. Magazines filled the gap by printing complete programs as text listings: a reader typed the listing into the computer, saved it to cassette or disk, and ran it. A single mistyped character could break a program, so the magazine's core content was literally code — games, utilities, and applications printed for the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and later the 128 and Amiga.

Ahoy! published many games in BASIC and machine language, and occasionally printed assembly language source code. Its program listings were the climax of every issue: contents pages promised them as "the best programs in print" and "more pages than ever before," and specific issues itemized dozens of programs — in the May 1985 issue alone, listings such as Super Duper by Dave Barron, a Two-Column Directory, DOS Plus, a Hardware Interrupt Wedge, a Commodore Font Editor, and games including Raid and Tile Time. The December 1984 issue offered a buyer's guide to printers for the VIC and 64, a tutorial on the KMMM Pascal language, and articles on creating fast graphics with custom character sets.

Bug Repellents and Flankspeed

Because typing in machine language — long columns of numbers — was especially error-prone, Ahoy! equipped its readers with checksum tools. Its celebrated program Flankspeed, written by Gordon F. Wheat, was a checksum utility for entering machine language listings: after typing a listing, the reader ran Flankspeed, which generated codes that could be compared against those printed beside the listing to locate mistakes line by line. Flankspeed was copyrighted by Ion International in 1984 and appeared in issue after issue as a standing utility.

For BASIC programs, the magazine printed Bug Repellents, by Michael Kleinert and David Barron, in separate versions for the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. The Bug Repellent generated a set of two-letter line codes for a typed-in program, which the reader compared with the codes printed below the program in the magazine; a discrepancy meant a typing error existed in that line. The magazine also maintained an S.O.S. department — "help for programmers lost at sea" — to answer readers' programming problems, and printed errata when its own listings needed correction.

Departments and staff

Ahoy! dressed its contents in a consistent nautical theme. The editor's letter was "View from the Bridge"; news and advance word on Commodore products ran as "Scuttlebutt"; readers' letters appeared as "Flotsam"; puzzles and programming challenges were "Commodores," described in one issue as monthly mindbenders and in another as "the starting place of many sleepless nights"; reader programming tips, for which contributors could be paid, ran as "Tips Ahoy!"; and an Art Gallery department showcased pictures drawn by readers on the Commodore 64.

The people behind the masthead

The masthead of the mid-1980s issues lists publisher Michael Schneider and editor David Allikas, with managing editors including Michael R. Davila and Robert J. Sodaro, senior editor Tim Moriarty, technical editors David Barron and Bob Lloret, art director JoAnn Case, entertainment editor Arnie Katz, and bulletin board sysop B. W. Behling. Its consulting editors lent the small magazine unusual distinction: the science fiction author Ben Bova, the hardware writer Morton Kevelson, and Dale Rupert, whose "Rupert Report" was a standing technical column. Regular columns included "Commodore Roots" by Mark Andrews and the "Cadet's Column" by Cheryl Peterson, which taught languages such as PROMAL and Pascal. Features also came from writers better known elsewhere, including Orson Scott Card, who contributed on game design and on educational software.

Recognition among Commodore magazines

Ahoy! competed in a crowded field of Commodore publications that included RUN, Commodore's own magazines, and The Transactor. It fared well in the judgment of its peers: Ahoy! itself proudly reported that INFO magazine's September–October 1985 product roundup had awarded it a four-star rating, the highest given to any Commodore magazine, with the only fault found being that it seemed to fluctuate from issue to issue — and that the August/September 1986 INFO ratings again gave Ahoy! four stars, the highest rating of any Commodore monthly, while two rival publications had lost ground.

The magazine also took part in the Commodore community's public life. At the World of Commodore expos — the major trade shows for the platform — Ion Publishing appeared as an exhibitor with Ahoy! and its Amiga sister title in 1987 and 1988, when attendance at the Toronto show exceeded forty-three thousand. Those shows, dominated by the Amiga, marked the direction in which both the platform and the magazine were heading.

The Amiga turn and Ahoy!'s AmigaUser

Commodore's launch of the Amiga in 1985 changed the center of gravity of the Commodore world from the 8-bit Commodore 64 to a far more powerful 16-bit machine, and Ahoy! followed its readers. A column called Ahoy!'s AmigaUser ran within the magazine, covering the Amiga while the main title still served the 64 and 128. Kevelson's features on the "Heart and Soul of the Amiga 1000" show the parent magazine itself devoting serious technical coverage to the new machine by 1986.

In 1988 the AmigaUser column was spun off into a separate publication, Ahoy!'s AmigaUser, dedicated entirely to the Amiga. In an unusual arrangement, the first two issues of AmigaUser were published instead of the parent magazine in May and August 1988. Readers' letters in the new title welcomed its mix of reviews, art gallery, and type-in Amiga BASIC programs — though some correspondent grumbled that a title devoted to the Amiga still carried Commodore 64 and 128 material — evidence of the awkward transition the whole Commodore community was making between its old and new machines.

The end of the run

Ahoy! published its final issue in January 1989, five years after its first — a complete career neatly contained within the lifetime of the home computer boom it covered. The magazine carried the International Standard Serial Number 8750-4383 and the OCLC number 11395055, and its subscription address moved through Mt. Morris, Illinois, while its editorial offices remained at 45 West 34th Street in New York, later in Suite 407 and Suite 500.

Its disappearance reflected the consolidation of the late-1980s computer magazine market, as the Commodore 64 aged, the Amiga's market narrowed, and the industry consolidated around the IBM PC and Macintosh. Many of Ahoy!'s competitors folded in the same period; the Commodore magazine ecosystem documented in hobbyist FAQs of the 1990s is a list of defunct titles of which Ahoy! is one entry among many.

Preservation and legacy

Unlike many magazines of its era, Ahoy! is unusually accessible today. The full run is held at the Internet Archive, and Commodore enthusiast sites host cover galleries together with downloadable disk images compiled from the magazine's type-in programs — effectively re-issuing, in digital form, the software that readers once typed by hand. The programs themselves, preserved in disk archives, let modern users run the games and utilities exactly as 1980s subscribers did, minus the typing.

That preservation gives Ahoy! a continuing research value beyond nostalgia. Its pages record, month by month, what ordinary home computer owners actually did with their machines between 1984 and 1989: the printers they bought, the languages they learned, the graphics they drew, the bulletin boards they dialed, and the programs they wrote and shared. As a primary source for the culture of the Commodore 64 — the best-selling single computer model of its era — Ahoy! remains a magazine historians of computing can still read cover to cover.