ThumpNugget

Agreed.. I would love to see a site set up like Atarimania does software for archiving printed material like magazines, books, newsgroup letters, manuals, etc.. A great solution would allow a person to thumb though the magazine (with 1920x1200 side by side pages is possible) and also allow some community editing ability to say.. indicate an area on a page and put in the meta data for that area if it is an advertisement, editorial, review, etc.. and also add the content.. That way as the archive grew you could search for any pages from all magazines... Say if I wanted to see all ads from Activision.. Out would pop up a timeline of all pages containing advertisements from Activision.. just scroll the thumbnails with the picture of the page and underneath have the magazine and date... It would be great for doing some interesting research... I'd love to see the "Blackpatch" or "Electronic One" ads in chronological order and see how prices changed overtime.. and other dumb stuff like that Basically a way to better handle the digitized older printed media that is searchable by eitehr meta-data or content but still has a way to nostalgically (is that a word?) view the material and take in the content. I've received many emails about getting copies of the ANTIC sets.. I do have 12-15 left. I'll get an exact count and get back with those that emailed sometime this weekend.

Thanks.. The ANTICS are actually finished: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=135197 I've completed 46 of the Analogs, I had some issues pop up so I'm a bit behind but catching up.. Now my plea: I'm missing Analog issue #1 and it turns out issues 42-49 are missing the ST-LOGs.. I'm also trying to have ATRs of the Analog disks along with the PDFs and so far I have everything from issue #32 on... So if anyone is looking to sell/trade issue #1, 42-49 or any of the analog disks before issue #32 please get in touch!

...and to make it more complicated a lot of people will stop for long periods of time and then "come back" for whatever reason. I went for about five years without unpacking my stuff and not doing much other than some casual web surfing to see if anyone was out there and judging the how active the "scene" was by looking at the comp.sys.atari.8bit group... Which seemed pretty dead other than the daily Bravo Sierra posts.

It looks like these never made it to the archive site... Here are the first six in PDF format if anyone is interested (I have not converted the programs yet): http://www.strikequick.com/Tricky%20Tutorials%201-6.pdf

That is a good idea but unfortunately I'm using a two sided scanner (scanning both sides simultaneously). It works really well (no bleeding) if i let it auto-detect black and white but black/white pictures tend to have that "faxed" look and it only fixes scans that have one or both sides without color. Someone told me about software that can take what is one one side and digitally remove it from the other (and vice-versa) as it is being scanned.. I'm hoping to try that if I can locate it.

Hey there.. I don't plan on making any more but I did make more than was needed (total of 27 copies). When the Analogs are done (end of Jan assuming I can find issue #1) and I start sending those out I'll offer up whats left of the ANTIC mag discs as well. Which reminds me of my Plea: I NEED ANALOG ISSUE #1!!! If someone has a copy and would like to sell it please get in touch!

Thanks much for the kind words! I couldn't send everyone a thank you email here as I could not correlate all of the names (on here) to the PayPal addresses. A special thanks to the guy that sent me $20.00!! I used everything that came in to buy more magazines (3 microkids, a kpower, first issue of electronic fun, a few of family computing, 3 compute!s I did not have, and all the Home Computer Magazines I was missing) I plan on scanning everything as collections get complete. I've been working backwards through the ANALOG magazines and the pages have been much thinner than the Antics... Fighting the "bleed-though" problem when there is very light stuff on one side and dark on the other. Not too bad and I expect the earlier analogs use higher quality paper. They have been much cleaner than the antics, I've not had to fight the streaks problem nearly as much. I am amazed how quickly they arrived. I shipped everything Saturday at 2:00pm The closest anyone was from me was about 1500 miles. One shipping day to go across the country using first class mail. Can't ask for much more than that.

I remember seeing adds for GCP and wanting so much to join but i was a bit young at the time... When I read this forum topic I decided to do a little bit of research and was able to locate the two people that started the company. One of them was the main programmer of the host side and the other the programmer of the client side. The bad news is that the source code for the Atari side (Action!) is no longer in existence and there is no design documentation. The host source apparently still exists. For those into trivia the GCP Server was a Charles River Data Systems 68000 running the UNOS operating system. The host software was written in C. The most users online at a time GCP could handle was 12. The company consisted of five employees with four of them being programmers.

Emails have been sent/answered to everyone who expressed interest. Thanks much everyone.

Thanks everyone, I went ahead and made a bunch of these this weekend (just have the front case card to do). I'll send out an email to those that have said they wanted one here (or sent me an email) with the exact cost... I'm going to ship these first class USPS so the shipping will probably be in the $2.00-$3.00 range which means the total with shipping will run from $8.00 to $9.00.. My goal is to ship these all at once at the end of next week (Dec 6). Hopefully everyone has PayPal As far as the Analog magazines... I have all the issues *except* issue #1. If somebody knows where I can buy/borrow/steal a copy of this that would be super. Also I'd like to get as many of the disks in ATR format for the archive as i can. I currently have disks for the last 22 issues (58-79) though I have not tried to convert them to ATR format yet. The Antic disks had about a 10 percent fail rate (10 percent of the disks had bad a single bad sector) the Analog disks have been better maintained so hopefully they will do better.

I did OCR the first few but I didn't see any way to reverse the process so I decided to do them all as simple PDFs, no optimizing, no OCRing, no modifications.. so that people can do what they want so as they sit they are unsearchable.. One PDF file per magazine.

Like I said.. only 6 bucks plus shipping to cover the material costs.. If it really bothers you send 3 DVD-Rs in a SASE and I'll burn you a copy... Or wait a few weeks and hopefully someone will put it up in a torrent...

You are correct, they are scans of the actual pages from the magazine... I'm not claiming the scans are perfect.. There is not too much bleed-through but pages with a lot of black did have issues at times with the thin pages... I had a devil of a time keeping the scanner clean so there are occasional streaks but for the most part they are pretty good. I have a good technique down now so the Analog magazine scans should be better. The jpegs below below were created from the PDFs and all pages were scanned at the same resolution:

Just to be clear: I'm not looking to make money off of this.. The cost will be minimal ($6.00+shipping - it takes 3 DVDs, the CD case, the ink, and the CD mailer )... In fact I'd much rather just swap for magazines I don't have. I am aware the content is already online... I just thought people would be interested for the ads and catalog inserts..

Greetings.. I've recently started archiving my print media with Antic Magazine being first on my list. I am curious if there is any interest out there for an archive of Antic in PDF format. The Antic archive is on 3 DVDs. This first DVD is volumes 1-4 (4,211 pages), the second DVD is volumes 5-9 (3904 pages), the third DVD is all of the inserts (1160 pages - Olympic catalog, antic catalog, etc). The third DVD also has an ATR for each magazine (most of them are the monthly disk mailed with Antic). I was considering doing a run of 25-30... The disc case is the same size as a normal CD case but holds three discs... the pics below should show what they look like.

Greetings... I've recently completed my Antic collection and have duplicates. I'm going to stick the pile of them up on an auction site but I thought I would see if anyone wanted to pick through the pile to help complete their collections.. say a 1.00 an issue plus shipping? Also willing to trade for other atari magazines, newsletters, etc.... Here is the list: Vol 2 No 06 - Sep 1983 Vol 2 No 07 - Oct 1983 Vol 2 No 08 - Nov 1983 Vol 2 No 09 - Dec 1983 Vol 2 No 10 - Jan 1984 Vol 3 No 02 - Jun 1984 Vol 3 No 03 - Jul 1984 Vol 3 No 04 - Aug 1984 Vol 3 No 07 - Nov 1984 Vol 3 No 10 - Feb 1985 Vol 3 no 11 - Mar 1985 Vol 4 No 05 - Sep 1985 Vol 4 No 09 - Jan 1986 Vol 5 No 03 - Jul 1986 Vol 5 No 06 - Oct 1986 (2 copies) Vol 5 No 08 - Dec 1986 Vol 5 No 10 - Feb 1987 Vol 5 No 12 - Apr 1987 Vol 7 No 07 - Nov 1989 Vol 7 No 09 - Jan 1989 (2 copies) Vol 8 No 04 - Aug 1989 Vol 8 No 05 - Sep 1989

Local craigslist ad for an Atari TT030... Not my ad, just some person local to me.. I have no idea if this is a good deal or not but thought I would pass it along.. http://boise.craigslist.org/sys/898212945.html

Well crap!.. I'm off by an issue number somewhere before the volume 3-4 change (my spreadsheet shows two April magazines) and I had no idea it went into 1984.. crap crap crap..

I agree it would have been better to start there but up until a week ago I was still missing 17 issues of the Analogs. Antic is also the one I'm least motivated to do so I thought If I didn't start there I may never get there. On the softsides I am missing Vol 6 No 1, 3, and 5 (and 7 if it exists). I have everything from Aug 1980 to Sep-82. It is difficult to track the softsides.. Vol 2 No 11 is issue #7 (the first I have and I *think* the second one covering Atari) and they went from vol 3 No 8 to Vol 4 No 8 (incremented the volume instead of the number). Vol 6 No 6 is the last I have. This is the issue that split and contains inserts for only one type of computer, the one I have has the Atari inserts. It has been difficult to find information on this magazine other than the early days when it was TRS-80 only.

I started scanning my Antics October 11th. So far I've completed through Volume 4 Issue 6 (except Vol 2 Issue 1 which has not arrived in the mail yet). Unfortunately I have to destroy the magazines (slice of one side) to scan them. I can't tell you how much it hurts to slice the sides off... I use a 90 pound paper slicer with a 17 inch blade that can cut phone books in half... As far as putting it on the internet.. I've scanned 3449 pages so far (plus another 192 for catalogs) and am at just under 3.7 gigs. The vol 3 and vol 4 magazine have taken more space because of the yellowing paper. My goal was to get them on one dual layer disk which will be cutting it close (there are about 8100 pages total to scan). The total size will be somewhere in the 8-8.5 gig range. At that size I'm not planing on putting it up on the internet but I was going to burn 15-20 copies or so and see if I could trade for some of the analogs/computes/softsides/etc to complete those collections and get them scanned. I imagine at least one of those copies would end up on the internet in short order as a torrent. My goal is to be done by thanksgiving. At my current rate I should beat that easily. I plan on doing Analog or Softside after that depending on which collection I complete next. I am still missing three Analogs (1,9, 10) and 5 softsides (well more than that but the 5 that include Atari anyway). The softsides are really interesting and the early issues predate Antic/Analog so there is stuff that's not in the other magazines such as ads from Atari that were not in Antic/Analog (like the anti piracy ads) and 6-7 months of sellers advertising the 815.. Monthly articles from Scott Adams.. interesting stuff.

Crypts of TERROR! On cassette, InHome software. never finished it.. My brother made a recording where he did a very good "Welcome... To.. Crypts.... Of... TerrrroorrRRrrrr" and built the story around the game.

Greetings, I'm working on completing my ANALOG magazine collection. Issues I am looking for: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 62 July 88 63 Aug 88 64 Sep 88 66 Nov 88 67 Dec 88 70 Mar 89 71 Apr 89 72 May 89 I'll pay decent money for any of those first 10 issues (not counting issue . I also have lots of duplicates of ANTIC/ANALOG and a few of ATARI AGE/ATARI EXPLORER/COMPUTE!

I think it is great you have a BBS online... I ran a BBS back in the early and mid 80's and it was a great experience. The reason it was a great experience is that it was a way to communicate with others like myself that were difficult to find any other way. There was always something new: always changing BBS programs, new boards going up and down, new terminal programs, linking message bases for multiple boards, etc.. It had its own culture and was a unique experience. Today with the ability to communicate to anyone everywhere all the time and virtually everyone taking part a BBS does not give new abilities but instead reduces them. There is no culture to grow, no new exciting BBS's or terminal programs or wondering what is next.. The function they served is served better by other methods.. Sad but true. The main purpose to have one today for users is Nostalgia. So how do you get more callers? My first suggestion would be to remove access barriers. It would be great if I could go to a web page and have a screen pop up in the middle with a nice color 148 screen and ATASCII graphics and have a login screen to the BBS. No telnet window to pull up, etc. Around the window could be some instructions or information for how to login, etc. Another option, and I think this would be great.. about 12 years ago I bought an Atari setup from a guy in Texas. I put it all in boxes and did not touch in for over 10 years.. Last year found the box and unpacked it and actually started the machine up.. To my surprise everything worked (Atari 800xl, 256K MIO, two miniscribe 30 meg hard drives, etc). The system had been a BBS express board (serial 009 on the BBS Express Pro! disks) I had a ball going through the message boards and reading messages from the past. I can't be the only one that has a old BBS message bases from the past sitting on eitehr hard disks or floppies. Imagine if you had a nice store of these old BBS systems from when they were retired or an image from when they existed in their hey-day.. Now I could go to your website and choose one of dozens of websites, the Atari could then boot the image for that BBS system and people can explore an actual BBS from the past with full message bases, ATASCII graphics, BBS lists, etc. You can even give them sysop access as most likely you are just making a fresh copy each time..

I bought some magazines from accousticguitar. They were packaged well, shipped fast and accurately described...

I don't know if you should neg him or not but I have one comment on the shipping issue. I have skipped a lot of auction because the shipping was crazy... but as long as the shipping is listed up front I don't think its an issue after the fact. The bad shipping price generally brings down the price they are going to get anyway. I just take the shipping into account when bidding, figure the highest I will pay, then subtract 10% if the shipping is crazy (I don;t like to support that type of behavior).