Electronic newspapers and magazines for ZX Spectrum

This section is devoted to electronic newspapers and magazines (scene ezines, or diskmags) published for the ZX Spectrum from the early 1990s onward. These titles became one of the brightest phenomena of the post-Soviet ZX Spectrum scene, bringing together news, technical knowledge, creativity and lively exchange among thousands of Spectrum users.

Most publications were runnable programs with loading screens, original interfaces, music and illustrations. Reading them became a unique multimedia experience, typical of the early home-computer era.

The first electronic magazines appeared on the Western computer scene in the late 1980s, mainly on the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST. The format later spread widely on the ZX Spectrum scene as well, especially in the countries of the former USSR, where amateur newspapers and magazines became an important way to share information within the community.

Magazines and newspapers were distributed on 5.25" floppy disks, sent by post and through FidoNet/ZXNet networks long before the Internet became widespread. Their pages carried scene news, game and demo reviews, articles on programming and hardware, interviews, readers’ letters, humour, fiction and original writing.

The split into magazines and newspapers is largely conventional. Many titles sat somewhere in between or changed format over time. Still, most of them shared the following traits: