Antonio Carlini wrote: That's a really good idea - thanks. (I'm now trying to work out if computershopper.com is anything to do with the magazine - hard to tell. Plus there seem to be two different sites claiming to be for computer shopper magazine subscriptions - which makes me think that at least one of them must be bogus!) Very murky waters there - it's hard to tell. The museum would certainly need to seek permission to "make public" any scans, but I suspect that initially scanning for the purposes of preservation within the museum group wouldn't fall foul of anything (but IANAL etc. :-) cheers Jules

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Antonio Carlini wrote: Wait... Are you guys talking about scanning Computer Shopper from back when it was the size of a phonebook? It seems to me that that era contains the most vintage-interest. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

I urge you to keep the paper copy. Paper is one of the longest preservable forms of information. Properly taken care of it will last centurys. Even Computer Shopper with its acid based paper would last a couple of centuries boxed in a dry environment. Scans are ephemeral...formats change...and it doesn't work at all without electicity. However I would love to have access to a online digital copy. Good luck in your project. Paxton -- Paxton Hoag Astoria, OR USA

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: 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? Don't you hate rhetorical questions?

On 6 Nov 2008 at 18:02, Fred Cisin wrote: Mostly the ads with scantily-clad women in them... --Chuck

Fred Cisin 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 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) 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). cheers Jules

2008/11/7 Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>: 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. It was full of ads, yes, but the writing was actually pretty good. The late great MacBiter was consistently brilliant, for instance. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

Tony Duell wrote: I'd agree about keeping the paper copy, although trying to prolong the life of said paper copy is going to be quite expensive. Also remember that the only realistic way of scanning something like this would be to chop off the spine. You can get such material rebound, but that adds to the expense. That (plus the fact that it saves a lot of effort) is why I would approach the pulisher first. I'd be surprised if Computer Shopper has any real "value" in old issues. If the publisher does have the issues in almost any kind of electronic form, conversion to PDF would surely be much easier than chopping, scanning, collating and checking. It all boils down to what (if any) conditions the donor specified. If they just wanted to get rid of it, then knifing off the spine to scan seems fair enough. If they wanted it preserved for all time, then they should have said so (and maybe given it to an organisation that isn't having difficulty keeping fixing the holes in the roof). I presume that the various copyright libraries all have a complete set too, so this certainly shouldn't be the only set in existence. Agreed. Although if you know what you want, it's much quicker to find it in a set of files that to wander up to the (groaning) attic and look for the relevant issue. Antonio

Pete Turnbull wrote: I cannot find my Practical Electronics back issues on CD right now. But I'm sure I've seen an electronic edition of either EPE or Elektor recently and it had advertising. So they might well not own the advertising, but I'd be very surprised if they could not distribute the magazine in its entirety. Anyway, if someone asks, we'll know! Antonio

Tony Duell wrote: In the real world "good enough" trumps "ideally." Without deep pockets, such as Google's, the only way to scan a large volume like this is to cut the spines off the magazines and use an ADF scanner. Look at what Al Kossow has managed to do with bitsavers. Yup, a lot of "collectible" documents have undergone spine-ectomies, but had he simply rented a warehouse and shelved everything, I'd guess that none of us would have heard, much less benefited from, bitsavers. Yup, it would be great if someone spent the time and effort to scan them page by page, index them, and find a new home for the original copies, and the person who received the paper copies then stored them in climate controlled conditions. But that is unlikely, in the general case, to ever happen. I haven't ever seen the UK Computer Shopper, but if was anything like the US version, there is about 95% redundancy between any two consecutive issues -- the same adds printed each month, perhaps with slightly different prices, in a somewhat different order each month. Too bad there isn't an easy way to take advantage of that redundancy to further compress the collection.

Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes: There have been two different magazines called "Computer Shopper" for many years, one from the UK and one from the US. Both were on sale in newsagents in the UK at one point, so I have odd issues of both from the early 90s. If there is a museum in the UK that has the space to collect computer magazines, I've got quite a lot of Amiga and Acorn magazines in storage -- it would be nice to keep them somewhere where other people could read them... -- Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>