Electron User was a magazine targeted at owners of the Acorn Electron microcomputer. It was published by Database Publications of Stockport, starting in October 1983 and ending after 82 issues in July 1990.[1]
Initially it was included as a 16-page pullout supplement to The Micro User but after four such editions it became a standalone title and within a year had grown to an average length of around 64 pages. The focus was news stories, type-in programs and software reviews. It also contained cheat codes and a long-running column on adventure games initially by "Merlin" in a column entitled "Merlin's Cave" and subsequently by "Pendragon".
Its advertisers included the top BBC/Electron games distributors of the day, such as Acornsoft and Superior Software.
Often the April-dated edition of the magazine included an April Fools' Day joke, generally consisting of a short machine code type-in listing which claimed to do something extremely useful and of wide interest but which in fact printed April Fool on the screen. Examples included:
a program to predict what text the user would type next
a program to compile BASIC programs directly into machine code leveraging the machine's BASIC interpreter
a program to display colours on a monochrome screen by rapidly modulating the pixels (citing a recent Tomorrow's World)
