A Proposal: When I Was Young.....
...I used to read a lot of computer magazines. Compute, Creative Computing, Omni and many others would either show up at my home or more likely, get bought with whatever money I was able to scrounge up. Pizza and the latest issue would be the order of the day, and I would eat my slice happily as I walked home and dreamed of computers not yet owned and software not yet purchased. One of the features of many computer magazines at the time were small postcards you could take out of the back pages. These cards, called reader service cards, would let you circle small numbers and indicate to some of the magazine's advertisers that you were interested in their product and wanted more information. Now, to a reasonable person, say, an adult reading the magazine, they might fill out one or two circles to get a catalog without having to call somewhere or waste postage. But that wasn't the case to me at 12 years old. This was an opportunity to get all these wonderful companies to send me neat stuff for free. So I did what anyone in my position (and perspective) would do.. ...I circled them all. Dozens of letters would arrive every day; my mother had no idea what to make of it. I started using multiple names, just so I could roughly track what flyers, leaflets and catalogs were coming as a result of which magazine. I quickly figured out that Creative Computing had the most active companies sending me stuff, so I'd hit them up for even more. My room started collecting piles of ads, papers, what have you being mailed to me. I started putting them all in a box, so I could look at them later, which of course I never really did. As time went on and the years passed, I kept the box and the papers inside, although as it moved from house to college to my apartments, it got a little roughed up:
![]() Please... Kill me... It's Been Eighteen Years.... And I finally took the box out of storage in my basement, sorted through it, moved things around, stacked by size, and began the process of cataloging and understanding exactly what I had. And the short answer is, I have a ton of fascinating stuff! Catalogs of companies now long gone (and forgotten), brochures promising you the world in eight bits, newsletters of what amazing things were around the corner. I found small photocopied pamphlets from software firms that were probably three guys in a basement, and four-color perfect-looking flyers from what was probably ALSO three guys in a basement (who spent some money to hire a fourth guy in an office building somewhere.) I found all the old products I'd drooled over, and amazed myself at the prices of how much things cost back then (and I even understand why my father kept saying "No" to me wanting the latest gimgaws I read about). In other words, this is a treasure trove of history! Now, it's definitely looking a lot better than the first picture:
![]() Where am I? So great, now it's all sorted and nice and all, and I could probably sift through it and enjoy it for my own sake and be done with it. But that's not the way I tick, if you've seen my other projects. I like to share, and I like to save. And to me, nothing could be better than getting all this stuff online. But how to do that? The simplest way is to scan the stuff in and make the scanned files available for people to download the scans they want. But now we start running into a couple of problems. One can be solved simply, the other takes a little more effort. Two Problems, One Down It would be one thing to scan in a bunch of pages, and put the pages up with no context, no information, and just present a directory. Man, that'd be boring. And that's not my way. So that problem can be solved by using the techniques I've learned with textfiles.com to sort the pages in a way that will make them easily viewable and searchable. To that end, I'll design something similar to the Linux Software Map, that is, an accompanying file that would match against a digitzed page such that you would be able to know a lot about the page without downloading it. I'd take some time to design it, but it would be pretty trivial to put together in a working form and add further things to it later. So great, we have a way to keep track of these scanned pages. But now we hit that thorny main problem: How the hell will I find the time to scan in 1,500 sheets of paper!? The answer to that is, I simply won't. Between the BBS Documentary I'm working on and the other related projects for TEXTFILES.COM in general, I can't afford to tie up my computer with scanning. In my case, it REALLY ties the computer; my whole machine waits for the scanner to finish its work before going on to the rest of the things it's doing. I just can't do this right now, and I don't want to go hog-wild trying to find the latest in scanner technology to do it right. And here's where you come in. I need people, actually, I need an army of people, to help me scan this stuff and get it online. There's so much of this stuff to put up, and I think it's worth the effort. I hope that others are out there, who think like I do, who want to help. Will you help me? I don't want to send this stuff through the mail right now; I'd rather drive it over and meet folks. So if you're within an hour's drive of the Boston Area, please let me know if you're interested in helping with this project. If you're not within an hour's drive, please contact me anyway, because no doubt I'll expand the whole process as time goes on. I thank you for reading this, and I hope you can help. - Jason Scott TEXTFILES.COM |
CLICK HERE TO SEE SOME EXAMPLES OF THE WORK TO BE DONE |
CLICK HERE TO SEE SOME OTHER SITES DOING THIS VERY SAME THING |