The Commodore 8-bit Magazine Index is a detailed catalogue of the articles published in 8-bit Commodore-specific print magazines.

The ultimate goal is to catalogue everything (except advertising), but for the first phase, I've made the decision to limit the catalogue to reviews, type-ins, and articles. What constitutes an article in Phase I is a bit arbitrary but it may be easier to describe what isn't making the initial cut. I'm omitting editorials, reader letters, press releases, lists of products or news bites without context, cute sidebars, puzzles, contests, jokes, and trivia. I did make an exception for Jim Brain's Commodore Trivia, published in Commodore World, for three reasons: (1) Jim describes his trivia questions as his "gift to the community at large" and I think that deserves some recognition, (2) the trivia represents a rare bit of cross-talk between Usenet and a print publication, and (3) some of the discussions of trivia answers are detailed enough to be articles in their own right.

I'm also leaving out regular features that consist entirely of helpful hints and programming snippets, so columns like RUN's "Magic" or Transactor's "Bits" have been omitted. These columns absolutely deserve to be indexed but that's too big a job for Phase I.

I have to admit, this index is biased towards North American publications but these are the magazines I grew up with here in Canada, so it only makes sense to start with what I know. I've never been terribly interested in game-review magazines, so I didn't spend any time with Zzap!, Commodore Format, or any similar game magazines published in the UK, but I do hope I get the opportunity to learn about any non-game-centric magazines that were published outside of my home continent. There's already an excellent Commodore Format Archive if you would like to learn more about that publication. I've also restricted my cataloguing work to 8-bit Commodores, so you won't find a lot of Amiga coverage here unless it intersects with 8-bit topics in some way.

The current version of the CBM Magazine Index is running on a paid Heroku dyno with generous limitations on the size of the database—enough to index every article in every 8-bit Commodore publication with lots of room left over. My current plan is to complete the Phase I cataloguing of Compute!'s Gazette (including the disk-only issues), dieHard, geoWorld, Info, Commodore World, Transactor, RUN, The TORPET, TPUG Magazine, Ahoy!, Commander, and Commodore Magazine in all its incarnations (including Micro and Power/Play among others). You can track my progress on the status page. Enjoy!

—Dr. Myles L. Skinner, Curator