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The Home Computer Course was one of those “part-work” magazines that you collected up every week and filed in the supplied hard backed binder to eventually build up into a useful reference library – or at least that was the idea. The Home Computer Course, by Orbis Publishing, was one such example of such a publication. It aimed to teach you everything you needed to know about computers from playing games, to home accounts, to programming in BASIC (Leading to many annoyed Dixons staff when some kid came in and entered the classic 10 PRINT “BIG BOO IS COOL!” 20 GOTO 10 on all the demo machines). In reality of course it was never going to make you a computer expert, but it had fun trying.
The biggest problem with it was it’s Jack of All Trades approach. Not only did it try to teach you everything from programming to accounts to word processing to games, but it attempted to do it no matter which computer you owned. Back in 1983, when the magazine first appeared, this was a pretty tall order, given that you had the Commodore Vic 20, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Oric 1, Dragon 32, Jupiter Ace, MSX and a great deal more to choose from – not just the rather simpler PC or Apple Mac choice we are faced with today.
Whilst the contents of the magazine attempted to be as generic as possible throughout, teaching you what different types of software were capable of, rather than actually how to use a particular package, it was the centre pages which each week focused on a different home computer that was the highlight for me. A description of the features of each machine and perhaps a little of the history behind it was accompanied by a full colour 2 page spread of the innards of that computer, it’s circuit board and microchips laid bare, each with a little line coming off labelled with what that component was, such as “16K RAM” or “6502 Central Processing Unit”. To be honest you were never really going to learn much from this, but it was fascinating to see what all these pieces of technology looked like inside, with risking breaking your own computer by taking a screwdriver to it.
The Home Computer Course was built up over 24 weeks, and was followed almost immediately by The Advanced Home Computer Course. A challenger called Input also appeared, which was similar but attempted to target a much smaller range of computers, which made the programming articles a bit more useful. Check out below the TV advert for The Home Computer Course. I especially like the bit where the drumming irritated fingers of the father are calmed by the kids hand, mirroring the general computer usage situation in houses up and down the land ever since, where the kids know more about the latest technology than the parents do!
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I remember reading a few of these, class. The other popular one was Input, I still have 4 binders worth in my shed some where.
Yeah, I seem to recall Input coming out after this and it being a better product, at least as far as the programming information went anyway. Unfortunately I was already buying the Home Computer Course and couldn’t stretch my pocket money to buying another weekly…
Great post. I really enjoyed it, I will have to bookmark this site for later.
Oh, the memories!
I collected the spanish version “mi computer”, a merge between “The Home Computer Course” and “The Advanced Home Computer Course” and I can tell that no other magazine after that reach its level.
But I’m strongly disagree with “you were never really going to learn much from this”. I learned boolean logic, trigonometry, basic electronic, c, pascal, forth and unix with this magazine. When I went to high school and then to the college (to study electronic-computation) what I learned make my life so much easy…
To be fair I probably did learn something from these books, but I had already learnt a lot of what they covered from other sources. The advanced course did sound more promising though, but I stopped at the end of the basic course.
Anyway, I’m glad you found it useful. Learning about computers back then was definitely a great thing to do, since you’ve been able to pick up on developments gradually over the years, rather than have to jump in at the deep end with a modern PC.
Just looking on the web to see if anyone has the complete set of the two folders of the Home Computer Course. I do. I just ‘dug it out of our attic, with a view to maybe selling it.
Hi
does anyone have a used copy of the home computer advanced course, i would like to purchase the whole set of 96 magazines
Thanks
Patrick
I have just put a complete copy of The Home Computer Course onto Ebay…
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220815305113&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_500wt_1156
Might be worth a look….
Wow! I remember The Home Computer Course. My friend and I started to buy it, but then soon after “Input” came out and my mate switched as it had a lot more programs to type in.
I wanted to switch to Input but my father wouldn’t let me (he was paying for Home Computer Course magazine) as I did eventually find the magazine was too article heavy and far fewer programs. They did some really big ones that went over many issues which were supposed to teach you different aspects of programming, but by that time I had grown bored with the magazine and only got it because my father paying for it,.
Input did seem to be the better of the two in my opinion as far as programming was concerned anyway, as the Home Computer Course was, as you say, a bit more article led.
That said one of the bits of the HCC that I did like a lot were the pages showing you the inner motherboards of various computers of the day. Totally useless information in the long run really, but fascinating to look at.
In response to patrick i have both a complete set of home computer and advanced home computer magazines all in binders that i am willing to sell
Here are scans of the complete run of the Home Computer Course. https://archive.org/details/The_Home_Computer_Course?sort=-publicdate