UK 1985

Once decoded, the message revealed a phone number to call and a person to ask for at Penguin Software. Doing so granted the caller a prize of a Spy’s Demise t-shirt. In order to foil cheaters, the programmers included a 10th line of cryptogram that never actually shows in the game. This line reveals a code word that was to be spoken to the person the player called, but in doing so it revealed that they scanned the code instead of playing through the game, and subsequently disqualified them for the prize. Although the game was released in 1982, by the end of 1984 only 4 people had won shirts. Unfortunately I have no knowledge of how many shirts there were in total, and if all were eventually won or not.

The Apple IIe rolls off the assembly line, and this issue takes a look at the assorted improvements made (“at last,” some might have insisted at the time) to what was now more clearly being acknowledged as Apple’s bread-and-butter computer. There’s also an introduction to the Apple Lisa (briefer, and dwelling in large part on that system’s bundle price of just under ten thousand 1983 dollars before sales tax), a profile of Penguin Software, and an “computerize your home” article leading off with how this helped the owner’s cat.

USA 1984

USA 1984

USA 1984

USA 1984

USA 1984