Practical Pokes
Jon North was the first person at YS to obtain the rights to some of the covertape. Well, except Duncan who managed to get ALS on it. Oh, and David Wilson who managed to secure enough space to get his song on there. But apart from all those, Jon North was the first person at YS to get a program on the covertape. But not just any old program - oh, no - that would be too easy. Mr Practical Pokes himself actually wrote a program to allow all the Speccy owners to cheat their way through top games. And he didn't just do it once, either. It went on again the next month (but with different cheats of course). And then again. And again. In fact, Jon was addicted to creating these things, and eventually managed to take over the entire covertape.
Meanwhile, back in the magazine, Jon's Practical Pokes column was getting smaller. Obviously he was spending too much time in getting the covertape 'Practical Pokes' bit ready. Still, he wasn't asleep, as when a Miss Tamsyn Parris sent in a load of pokes, he instantly recognised that they were either ripped off from Sinclair User or taken straight out of Your Sinclair. And most of them had been written by Jon anyway.
In fact, a photo of Jon was printed in one Practical POKEs. It showed him on a beach, buried up to his neck in sand, wearing sunglasses and grinning like a fool (sadly this picture is lost forever. So we still don't have one.) Jon was famous for not returning the games sent him to hack until we threatened to send Andy to bash him up (or, more correctly, to pogo him repeatedly into a wall); at one point, he had something like 2,518 of YS's games in a huge box in his attic. Jon also took out all of the rude bits in the demos we had on later covertapes, leading to a demo appearing that consisted entirely of rude words, called something like, "Let's See Blimmin' YS Put This On The Covertape Then."