''Nibble'' was a magazine for

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

enthusiasts published from 1980 until 1992. The

name A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A personal ...

means "half a byte" or "four bits." Most of the articles incorporated the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

of a small to medium-sized utility, application program, or game (each written specifically for the magazine) and a detailed description of how it worked. The headquarters was in

Lincoln, Massachusetts Lincoln is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The population was 7,014 according to the 2020 United States Census, including residents of Hanscom Air Force Base that live within town limits. The town, located in the MetroWest region o ...

History

The magazine was first published in January 1980 by Mike Harvey. Originally published eight times per year, by 1984 the magazine had attained a popularity that allowed it to become a monthly publication. It was published for more than twelve years; the July 1992 issue was the last. The magazine also published checksum tables that, with utilities available from the magazine, helped pinpoint the location of any errors in a reader's own typed-in copy. The programs were also available on disk for a small fee for those who did not want to spend the time to type them in. A technical highlight of ''Nibble'' was a regular column called Disassembly Lines, in which Dr. Sanford Mossberg presented assembly listings he had reverse-engineered from interesting parts of

Applesoft BASIC Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the original ...

and the

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...

to illustrate how they worked. Later Mossberg turned his attention to the Apple IIGS and dissected its Toolbox and operating system as well.

Omnibus edition An omnibus edition or omnibus is a creative work containing one or more works by the same or, more rarely, different authors. Commonly two or more components have been previously published as books but a collection of shorter works, or shorter wor ...

s of the best articles from each year's issues, dubbed ''Nibble Express,'' were published annually. The magazine also published other books that repurposed magazine material on various topics, such as games, personal finance programs, and "Apple secrets." Mossberg's Disassembly Lines columns were also collected in four volumes. Harvey's publishing company, MicroSPARC (later MindCraft), published a number of Apple II programming utilities including an assembler and a BASIC-like set of macros for it. These were sold by mail-order from ads in the magazine. (Trivia: the company changed its name after

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

bought the name MicroSPARC for a new line of processors.) A spinoff Macintosh publication, ''Nibble Mac,'' was first a section in ''Nibble'' and then was published separately. Like the original, ''Nibble Mac'' focused on hobbyist programming, notably

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, fl ...

. Most of the ''Nibble'' material, including ''Nibble Mac,'' is now available again from the publisher through his Web site.

References

External links

Official site
Monthly magazines published in the United States Apple II periodicals Defunct computer magazines published in the United States Home computer magazines Magazines established in 1980 Magazines disestablished in 1992 Magazines published in Massachusetts Eight times annually magazines published in the United States {{compu-mag-stub