John Kavanagh is an Irishman who never stopped thinking about the computers he grew up with — the Sinclair Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC, the Atari 800XL, the Apple II. In 2015, he launched a Kickstarter campaign for Eight Bit, a full-colour printed magazine devoted entirely to 8-bit microcomputers from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The campaign funded. Then the next one funded. And the next. Fourteen issues later, Eight Bit has become one of the most enduring independent publications in the retro computing scene, produced in A5 format with the kind of enthusiasm that only someone who genuinely cares about the difference between a Spectrum 48K and a Spectrum 128K can sustain.
Each issue covers hardware deep-dives, game retrospectives, programming tutorials, collector guides, and interviews with the developers and designers who built the machines and wrote the software that defined an era. The magazine’s focus is deliberate: 8-bit only. No 16-bit consoles, no Amigas, no early PCs. That territory belongs to Retro Format, Eight Bit’s sibling publication, which Kavanagh launched in 2019 as a larger A4 magazine covering consoles and computers up to the Sega Dreamcast. Together, the two titles form a small publishing family archived by the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, California — a mark of the seriousness with which the retro computing community regards Kavanagh’s work.
The operation runs on Kickstarter campaigns, direct sales with free worldwide shipping, and the kind of grassroots word-of-mouth that thrives in forums, Discord servers, and retro gaming meetups. There are no advertisers to please and no editorial compromises to make. Kavanagh edits, designs, and publishes from Ireland, and the 8-bit scene — which is not only alive but actively producing new hardware and software for machines built forty years ago — provides him with more material than any quarterly schedule can contain.
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