The first interactive digital publication conceived in Malta was released in August 28 years ago.
Peculiarly entitled ROM, the publication exclusively covered the contemporary digital art culture of the time, which started to emerge and develop among the curious youths of the early ’90s as they used computers as their medium of choice to create art.
The publication ran solely on Amiga computers (the most popular home computer of the early 1990s) and was distributed for free throughout Europe by postal mail... on a ‘floppy diskette’, the main data medium before the era of USB drives, which could hold a whopping (sic) 880 kilobytes of data. At the time, this was the primary media to disseminate information from computer to computer.
It was a time when Malta had yet to embrace commercial internet access and e-mail; yet, with all its limitations, and in a short time span, ROM became the most popular international magazine on disk of its kind.
ROM ran for three whole years, with a total of nine issues published. Aimed at an international audience, the content was all in English.
Youths from all over Europe contributed articles on the Amiga computer art scene, from programming curiosities to computer news, vibrant pixelated graphics and even original music soundtracks that one could listen to while reading the magazine.
The articles provided a peek into the computer and digital arts advancements of the time, untainted by commercial influences.
These young people are often considered to be the first pioneers and creative explorers of the digital revolution.
The most popular international disk magazine of its kind
The editor of the publication was Noel Baldacchino, better known in the digital art scene as ‘Mop’. He empowered a team of creative people, all working hand in hand, without any budget or financial gain. They had only one purpose, that of advancing and promoting this new form of digital art on computers.
In 1994, all communication was carried out through hand-written letters delivered by post, and the odd phone call when the deadline was near.
The innovative design of the publication, with its chromatic graphics, crisp typography and several soundtracks, became the new standard of the time. Copycats were aplenty, yet ROM enjoyed peerless popularity and was voted for several years as the best disk magazine in the Eurocharts Top 20.
ROM was the first magazine to introduce specialised and technical language to the art culture thriving onto the 1990s computer scene, nowadays better known as ‘demoscene’.
Privy only to shrewd head-hunters from the videogame industry until recent years, the ‘demoscene’ always nurtured in the nether realms of subcultures.
UNESCO changed that in June 2020, when it recognised the ‘demoscene’ as the first digital culture and an intangible world cultural heritage.
The language contribution kickstarted by ROM, still widely used today, was among the key points that helped make all this happen.
Disk magazines like ROM are a valuable source for researchers, who are still writing papers on the ‘demoscene’ and its effect on all other computer subcultures to this day.