New vintage computing publication

>>>> will help attractive people

Hi everyone, Having conferred with Jay West, I'd now like to introduce the readers of this mailing list to a new publication, the Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter. A few of you already know me as evan947@yahoo, the guy who collects handhelds/PDAs. More than a few of you know Michael Nadeau, formerly of Byte magazine, who founded the Classic Tech E-Letter a few years ago. Meanwhile, I and Sellam Ismail (who EVERYONE knows) pondered starting a print magazine for the hobby last fall. Ultimately we decided the hobby just isn't big enough yet to support that. Instead, early this year Mike handed over the reigns of his newsletter to me. For those who don't know me, besides being a computer collector, I (like Mike) am a veteran technology reporter. Paid my dues at Gannett (which owns USA Today and other papers), was a staff engineer at a product review lab for telecom gear, and spent 3.5 years at eWeek (formerly PC Week.) I'm 29 and grew up on Apple and Atari. The first thing I did as the new editor is change the name. I think "Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter" is more intuitive and will help attractive people who aren't necessarily familiar with our growing hobby. I also changed some of the fundamentals. Before, the newsletter had infrequent publishing, and in each issue an attempt was made to cover all of the news out there. That's a difficult way to run things. So now, the newsletter is published every Monday. Also, in every issue we have one main article (news, opinion, etc.), vs. trying to be a comprehensive news outlet every single week. By "we" I mean myself, Mike, Sellam, and author Christine Finn (Christine's known for writing the book "Articacts: An archeologist's year in Silicon Valley"), and Erik Klein, who runs www.vintage-computer.com. Of course we did not want to overlap with this mailing list. Tech tips are clearly this list's domain. So with the newsletter we're sticking to the root word: news. To be crystral-clear, we're not a forum, and we're not going to duplicate existing efforts. We also didn't want to duplicate fragment the existing online classified ads and marketplaces of Sellam's and Erik's web sites. So instead they each send me their top three or four ads on alternate weeks, which I publish in the newsletter. Along with the ads there's a link that says "click here for more," taking readers to their respective sites. So as you can see, we've revamped the old Classic Tech E-Letter into something that's fresh, consistent, and clearly carving out its own niche. Besides the few of us behind the scenes, we also solicit guest writers. For example, Visicalc legend Dan Bricklin gave us a column, as did the Digibarn's Bruce Damer. Macintosh inventor Jef Raskin did an interview with us. We interviewed the CTO of Hewlett-Packard's printer division, and even IBM's David Bradley -- better known as the guy who invented Ctrl-Alt-Delete. We also went to suburban Philadelphia to write about a video game conference. We currently have about 450 subscribers. On our informational site, which is news.computercollector.com, there is additional content. There's a computer history bookstore, a small but growing page of tales from collectors, an events calendar, a summary of our articles to date, and yes, some lame Google ads to help us pay for the hosting. Anyway, the newsletter is FREE, and if you subscribe we promise to never, ever give away your email address or send you spam. We also would love to have some of you write guest columns. The slate is wide open; write about anything you're passionate about in the hobby. If you're not a writer, then just send us your ideas for articles, and/or news we should be aware of. Sometimes, we'll make factual mistakes, and we promise to be vigilant about identifying and correcting those. As I told Sellam, I respect and fear that most of the readers of the classiccmp lists know way more about computer history than I ever will. So please bear with us when, not if, we mess up. Thanks for taking this time to read this long message. To subscribe to the newsletter, go to our site (again, that's news.computercollector.com), click the subscribe link, and just put in your email address. Thanks again, Evan Koblentz PS -- I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you visit the area and want to chat about vintage computing over a drink, I'm always interested.