“The Transactor” magazine, Commodore, 1978-1989 | Hacker News Reader

“The Transactor” magazine, Commodore, 1978-1989

commodore.ca

69 pointsemptybits8 comments

The last issue of Transactor was going to be 1982 Vol #3 / Issue #6, when they were going to shift its readership to the much larger US publication, but they got so many inquiries to keep it going, plus a new sponsor / advertiser that they went to the new Vol #4 and switched to a "professional print publication.". Those two volumes are interesting to read.

[0] https://www.commodore.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/the_tran... [1] https://www.commodore.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/the_tran...

The best thing, IMHO, about The Transactor as compared to other C64 magazines was that they published actual assembly source code instead of distributing stuff written in assembly as lengthy blocks of numbers with checksums. You could read it and see what was going on.

I devoured every issue of The Transactor when it arrived in my (snail) mailbox. It would be 15 years before I made the jump from hobbyist programmer to professional, but I loved learning so much about my computer (back when it was actually possible to know everything about a computer.

People like Jim Butterfield were gods!

Transactor (for its time) was amazing. I bought it off the rack, and as soon as I found a new one, the rest of the world went away for a couple of days. Fondly recall most the issues about hacking the CPU in the 1541 floppy drive. I needed that and an Epyx Fast Load (5x faster! disassembler!) ... and that's all.

Wow, didn't realize cool things like this once existed decades ago. So many information have been buried and lost in the history. Probably need a HUGE database to store all these kind of information before they lost...

Thankfully this one has some archives. But indeed, not everything does.

Even with some backup, the Internet has not always proven itself to be a reliable means of archiving things. Companies (and their websites) vanish, and not always with a working archive somewhere. YouTube channels routinely vanish, along with their content, and in many cases it's on you to back something up (using third-party libraries).

A good chunk of Transactor is also available at https://archive.org/details/transactor-magazines, which does happen to be a huge database to store this kind of information.

It's nice to see it available elsewhere too. At first glance, the quality of the files at commodore.ca seems higher than archive.org. And having redundant sources rather than relying on one source for archiving this sort of thing is encouraging.

We should upload this collection as a second source to archive.org. If nobody else volunteers, I can do it.

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