10 Nov
2008
10 Nov
'08
4:44 a.m.
2008/11/7 Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>:
Fred Cisin wrote:
Er, no, not really. This kind of thing is quite common.
I used to work for Dennis Publishing, the publishers of the UK edition
of Computer Shopper. The following is from memory when I was there.
They have no connection with the US publishers - Dennis just bought
the rights to use the name in the UK. No US content was reused or
anything; they even designed their own, vaguely similar logo for the
UK mag as they hadn't bought the US logo.
Both mags were designed to be similar, though: large, fat high-volume
titles on low-quality, cheap newspaper stock, with articles on
relatively small, minority-interest computer types. The SF author
Charles Stross (a friend of mine, as it happens) wrote CS UK's Linux
column from its inception to when he quit to become a full-time
novelist.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/
I also know one of the chaps who used to write the Acorn RISC OS
column in /Shopper/, Jim Nagel. That column was a mine of info, too.
http://www.archivemag.co.uk/
Later on, about 5-10y later, the US company that published the
original Shopper opened a UK office. (Ziff Davis, as I recall.) By
then I was a freelancer and I wrote for them as well as Dennis.
Because ZD didn't have the UK rights to the Shopper name, they could
not publish it here.
Such deals go both ways - I have a feeling that MacUser started out as
a UK title and Dennis sold the rights in the US. Certainly that's what
happened with Maxim: UK first, later US.
On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Jules Richardson wrote:
I'm actually wondering now - given the websites and comments from a couple
in this thread, it seems like there might be two magazines with the same
name. Ain't life complicated at times...
The collection we were offered is/was pretty complete - issue 1 to the
present
day, with just a few missing; the problem is that it's a huge about of
storage
space for something that would very rarely be required as a reference,
and
there are more important machine/manufacturer-specific things needing
shelf
space.
Do you have a copy of "dBase2 v the bilge pump"?
Do you have a copy of Osborne's "The guy on the left"?
Do you have a copy of World Power System's ads?
Do you have a copy of the Otrona "little tramp" ad?
Do you have a copy of the IBM converable '57 Chevy ad?
Do you have a copy of the Apple ad "welcoming" IBM?
Do you have a copy of the Lisa ads?
How many truly memorable early ads can you recall? The UK one (which is the one the museum's been
offered) was well known for
being very full of ads - with not much in the way of actual useful
journalism - but that doesn't really rule out it being the one you're
alluding to (I don't think I ever read it prior to 1990 or so, so I never
got to see it in the glory days of computing)
It was full of ads, yes, but the writing was actually pretty good. The
late great MacBiter was consistently brilliant, for instance.
FWIW though, it is difficult to decide what to accept
and what not. If space
was infinite, it'd be accepted and all go onto archive shelving and be there
"just in case", but in the real world that's just not practical :-(
It's
logical to me for a computer museum to be first port of call when it comes
to researchers looking for computer magazines - but at the same time the
anticipated demand for advertising-heavy "generic" computing magazines in
comparison to other printed material out there is anticipated to be
extremely low.
Having them in scanned form would at least preserve the information "just in
case" whilst not taking up physical space - but it'd be a heck of a scanning
effort (I'm not even convinced they'd go through a sheet-fed scanner
actually, the paper was so thin and clay-heavy).
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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