Year One: one full year of COMPUTE!’s Gazette. A founder’s retrospective, the Callback 8020 verdict, In Memoriam Bobby Prince, Synapse Software, the debut 640K Club, plus Gremlin’s lost games, Commodore Corner, GEOS, Tandy, FujiNet, and more.

“Year One” — One Year of COMPUTE!’s Gazette Magazine: From a Half-Formed Idea to Thirteen Issues and Counting.

A year ago this magazine didn’t exist — not as a website, not as a subscriber list, not as a single printed page. It began with a Commodore 64 pulled out of storage, an enormous thrift-store LaserJet wrestled into a truck bed, and a question that wouldn’t let go: whatever happened to COMPUTE!’s Gazette? This anniversary issue marks one full year of bringing the magazine back, with a founder’s retrospective that tells the story honestly — the good, the hard, and the parts no one could have planned for — while looking ahead to year two.

Inside this 100-page issue:

• Year One: Loading Complete — Edwin J. Nagle’s founder retrospective on how a simple newsletter quietly became a magazine, the deeper history of the “Gazette” name (from Len Lindsay’s 1978 PET Gazette through Tom Halfhill’s recollection of the “Commodore Gazette” working title), and why a name that never belonged to a single machine was always a community bulletin at heart.
• Flipped Off: The Community Weighs In on the Callback 8020 — The cover story. A measured, unrushed verdict on Commodore International’s clamshell “not-dumb dumbphone,” from CEO Peri Fractic’s digital-wellness pitch to the “cash grab” backlash, the late-June price cuts and the remanufactured-memory controversy, Leonard Tramiel’s blessing, and whether a browser you can’t steer is a feature or a wall.
• In Memoriam: Bobby Prince (1945–2026) — A tribute to the lawyer-turned-composer who gave Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D their definitive sound, whose Doom tracks entered the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry weeks before his death.
• The Rise and Fall of Synapse Software — The story of Ihor Wolosenko, the Star Raiders-obsessed co-founder who came to computing from psychology and theater, and the studio behind Blue Max, Shamus, and a database package that began it all.
• The 640K Club — The debut of a new beat covering the IBM PC and its descendants, led by Microsoft’s open-sourcing of 86-DOS (recovered byte-for-byte from printouts in Tim Paterson’s garage), Ted Fried’s XTMax software-defined ISA card, and new “runs on an 8088” games and applications.
• The Gazette Wire — David Simmons on a wave of new releases, including Petal Panic from the A Pig Quest team (Antonio Savona and Hobbit/Alain Mauricet) and Stormbeard.
• Games / Reviews — The Gremlin Archive — A deep dive into Games That Weren’t and Mark Hardisty’s A Gremlin in the Works, unearthing unreleased C16/Plus-4 curiosities like Dork’s Dilemma, Tycoon Tex, and Tour de Force.
• Insight: ATARI — John Zielke and Jerry White on backing up floppies with the A8PicoCart (no FujiNet or KryoFlux required), building a better Atari character set one descender at a time, and getting started with Atari LOGO.
• Commodore Corner — Peri Fractic concludes the Italy trip: gondolas, canals, a hug in St. Mark’s Square, Mike’s “SELL US AMIGA” email, and the whispered future of Amiga’s custodianship.
• The GEOS Column — Bruce Thomas continues his tour through the surprisingly deep world of GEOS.
• Dialed Back — Rob Sherman on BBS culture, then and now.
• Content Corner — Brian P. Cox on the unlikely chain of people and podcasts — Stan Veit, David Greelish, Randy Kindig — that preserved a slice of computing history.
• Programming / FujiNet & Digest — Thomas Cherryhomes on network-aware BASIC work, plus Dan Sanderson’s Digest exploring IFF-ILBM graphics and the “Four-Byte Burger” on the MEGA65.
• Tandy Land — Ian Mavric on Tandy Assembly’s new home, decoding TRS-80 catalog numbers, and the Tandy 1000.
• Micro Missions — Two new programming challenges from The Evil Professor.
• Plus Letters to the Editor, Editor’s Notes (with a first hint at the cross-platform “relay server”), type-in program listings, and the news and reader correspondence that make the Gazette what it is.

Retro computing for Commodore, Atari, Amiga, Commander X16, MEGA65, and beyond.