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Creative Computing Magazine
- dnewton99 10y agoI just found about 50 issues of Creative Computing in my Dad's old stuff. Any thoughts on who might want them?
- PaulHoule 10y agoThis is great! One problem with Creative Computing is that most libraries seemed to think it was ephemeral and they got rid of their holdings in the early 1990s, so it has been really hard to find. Even my mom thought it was ephemeral and she threw out most of my collection.
- johansch 10y agoThat's the thing I don't really get about libraries. They are incredibly deletionist. My pet theory: the librarians feel they have power that way, by "curating" the collection that will presented to the peasants.
- DanBC 10y agoLibraries are underfunded. Climate controlled storage for stuff that most people won't use is expensive. There are some libraries the do keep everything, so it's not "lost".
- waqf 10y agoBut they don't scan everything or even ILL everything, so it's pretty lost by contemporary standards.
- vidarh 10y agoIt'll get there. We have a gap now, but many national libraries and other large collections do understand the value of scanning and making available. Part of the challenge is that they then to will prioritise old and rare publications to things like these magazines, especially when copyright limitations makes it challenging to publish the newer material. There are many quite decent publicly accessible collections of computer magazines, though, because of the audience - other types of magazines are in a worse position.
- PaulHoule 10y agoI can say I've looked for Creative Computing in some of the largest and most prestigious libraries on the east coast of the U.S. and the haven't had it. It wasn't just the public libraries that thought it was obsolete, it was the big academic libraries too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ovt 10y agoI don't like deletion very much either in general, although I've seen librarians defend themselves with 1. that they totally don't have room for stuff 2. for kids' stuff, at least, if it's science, our knowledge has grown so much that it's a disservice for them to read the old book without context. Or if it's fiction, it can be full of social norms and beliefs that we've grown beyond, where...we'd also want them to have context if they were going to read it. But it sucks when you hear how they often don't have a good sense of the value (intellectual or otherwise) of what they cull. And it sucks if everyone makes the same judgment and all throw away our ephemera that we wish to look back, evoke memories, reveal something of our time.
- johansch 10y agoMost libraries (in Europe, at least) tend to have an incredibly low density of books. I think the image of a good-looking library is more important to them than to actually have more books on the shelves. E.g. something like this (the main public library in Linköping, Sweden): https://cdn3.cdnme.se/cdn/7-2/1081760/images/2012/dsc_0337_189053713.jpg https://cdn3.cdnme.se/cdn/7-2/1081760/images/2012/dsc_0337_1... rather than something like http://f.tqn.com/y/seattle/1/W/V/F/-/-/IMG_8459.JPG http://f.tqn.com/y/seattle/1/W/V/F/-/-/IMG_8459.JPG
- PaulHoule 10y agoDamn, how do they keep the books from falling out of those sideways shelving units in Seattle? ;-)
- WalterBright 10y agoKenmore's public library has a low density of books as well - wide aisles, low shelves. I suspect it is partly due to wanting to be accessible to people in wheelchairs. But few books kinda defeats the purpose of having a library. Half-Price Books in Bellevue is more my speed. It's completely packed with books. I could putter away hours in there.
- criddell 10y agoThey are trying to serve their patrons with limited resources. Getting a new box of books in means that something old has to go. I don't think it's more sinister than that.
- wolfgke 10y agoThe much bigger problem is that copyright doesn't allow people to scan books/magazins and distribute the scans. As DanBC writes "Climate controlled storage [...] is expensive". On the other hand: Disk space is very cheap (even if you want high redundancy).
- greglindahl 10y agoThe Internet Archive has a "lending library" of post-1923 books where we own a physical copy, stored in a shipping container in a warehouse, and loan one digital copy at a time for each physical one that we own. https://blog.archive.org/2010/06/28/digital-lending-library/ https://blog.archive.org/2010/06/28/digital-lending-library/ https://archive.org/details/lendinglibrary&tab=about https://archive.org/details/lendinglibrary&tab=about We're hoping to get libraries to join with us to make their books in remote storage available in a similar fashion.
- Doradus 10y agoEasy, there. Librarians aren't the bad guys in this story.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoPlease see http://awfullibrarybooks.net/why-weed/ http://awfullibrarybooks.net/why-weed/ for a justification of why a library might reduce its collections.
- jimjimjim 10y agowow. did you get shushed by a librarian as a child? Librarians are not power mad media moguls. Librarians and Libraries are closest the non-IT world has to open source/free software/knowledge sharing. They have always been a fantastic resource for the "peasants" as you call them.
- jean_claude 10y agoWhile there may be some power-mad librarians out there in terms of 'there will be silence in the library!', they curate the library's collection for many reasons: to meet the requirements of stakeholders, to meet the needs and shifting interests of the community, to make room for new material... Really, there are a whole host of reasons for deaccession of library materials that include financial, space, and other concerns that hit the bottom line. The great thing about technology is we have the ability to collect, classify, add metadata[1], and make all human knowledge accessible to everyone. If only insanely long copyrights and restrictions on scanning and lending copyrighted works were not in the way. [1] This is not really something a busy librarian has time for, so other methods, such as user-driven tagging and folksonomies[2] are an interesting solution that is being tried. [2] http://interactivearchivist.archivists.org/technologies/tagging/ http://interactivearchivist.archivists.org/technologies/tagg...
- vidarh 10y agoEvery librarian I've ever spoken to has been incredibly good at pointing me in the right direction if they didn't have anything in the local library. They understand the need for archival, but they are also limited in space and money and need to focus on what their typical users actually read. If you can't find something, ask your librarian where it might be available. Generally they can give suggestions, and may even spend time helping you search. In my teens had libraries contact specialist libraries and dig obscure translations of works out of vaults for me where they could have just told me sorry and pointed me to the several newer/more mainstream editions of the same work they had out (I was transcribing some books where the newer translations were still in copyright and where I was also hunting for additional forewords), despite being young enough at the time that they could've easily dismissed me as not having any "important" reasons to trouble them with asking for just those editions. My experience is that if you're nice, most librarians love it when they are asked for something unusual by someone who clearly cares about the books.
- tokai 10y agoAs a librarian using my summer weeding, I can tell you that that is not the case. Having a large, irrelevant, unruly collection is a great way to make a library useless for the users. A library is not an archive. Other collections take care of long term storage. Primarily national libraries through legal deposits. Edit: Worldcat shows 570 libraries have the magazine in their collection, and every library worth its salt can get it from them by inter library loan. So its not hard to get your hands on by a long shot.
- WalterBright 10y agoI loved that magazine. The first years of it had a charming quality to them I've never seen anywhere else. The early issues are treasures. The later ones got more conventional.
- tomcam 10y agoVery well put. The issues in that first year made those of us who weren't programmers feel like we could be. It was thanks to them and COMPUTE! that I actually did become one, and eventually a consumer of Walter Bright products!
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- andreygrehov 10y agoText version of the magazine: http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/index/ http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/index/
- yitchelle 10y agoThanks, but there is nothing like seeing it in "print" to bring back the memories.
- walshemj 10y agoTakes me back seeing adverts for s100 cromenco and USCD Pascal - I once had to stay late to call Microsofts help desk with a tricky USCD Pascal query (that was when they where in new mexico I think)
- Pamar 10y agoOh Wow! They have Byte, too... https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-rescans https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-rescans
- yitchelle 10y agoJason Scott has been really busy in recent times. Just saw on twitter of him announcing Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebook during his Atari days from 1977. https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977
- Famicoman 10y agoFYI, rescans is a subset of the main Byte collection, https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine. My email is slapped on the collection page for that one if you notice something mislabeled. If yoy have Byte issues that need scanning for Archive.org, I have contacts for those kind souls as well.
- johnhattan 10y agoHere's the instructions if you want to do a batch download to your favorite offline e-whatever. https://blog.archive.org/2012/04/26/downloading-in-bulk-using-wget/ https://blog.archive.org/2012/04/26/downloading-in-bulk-usin...
- greglindahl 10y agoOur new command-line tool makes that even easier: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive
- ryandrake 10y agoNice blast from the past. My intro to programming was as a 9 or 10 year old manually typing most of the samples from Creative Computing's _BASIC Computer Games_ [1] into a Commodore 64 and actually getting them to work. The best one was this one [2], 2.5 pages of densely packed no-whitespace all-caps BASIC. No OCR! 1: http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/index.php http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/index.php 2: http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=157 http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=15...
- itgoon 10y agoThis is what got me into computers at age 9. There were comics, and I didn't understand them. So I started reading the articles. The articles didn't have anything to do with the comics, but I was fascinated, and ended up buying a ZX-81, then a Commodore 64, and...well, I'm still doing it.
- avifreedman 10y agoAwesome! This was my goto magazine :) Much more code per issue than Byte, and easily modifiable games, which were great for learning. Thanks to the Archive for scanning! If there are any issues missing, I may have them and be able to help contribute.
- jejones3141 10y agoOy, I wish I'd kept a listing of the Algol W snowflake curve program I wrote up for Creative Computing and that they published in the Nov-Dec 1978 issue. The printout combined with the scan makes it hard to read. Ah, well; I did it to myself.
- Lord_Nightmare 10y agoIt looks reasonably readable to me if zoomed in. It should be possible to retype from the scan, if someone wanted to.
- sitkack 10y agoI found an copy of The Best of Creative Computing Vol 2 http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/ http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/ at a thrift store years ago and was immediately hooked. It reminded me of all the neat hobby projects that would come across fidonet when I was a kid. Now everything is an acqui-hire or flip, the ratio of exploration and art in coding projects has definitely dropped.
- DonHopkins 10y agoI love the cover by Gilbert Shelton, with Fat Freddy's Cat fleeing in front of the the pick-up truck! http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=cover http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=cover
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI used to love all these old magazines. Learned so much from Creative Computing, RUN, Compute (and compute's gazzette), Dr Dobbs (when it was a real magazine), etc.
- JoeDaDude 10y agoLike Creative Computing, I remember the pleasure I got from Algorithm Magazine, which included pseudocode for fractals, neural nets, cellular automata, and all those things that attracted me to computers. Algorithm Magazine was put out by noted computer scientist and author Alexander Dewdney (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/faculty/akd/akd.html http://www.csd.uwo.ca/faculty/akd/akd.html). I would gladly scan the few hardcopies I still have (not a complete set though) if someone else would host them.
- amenghra 10y agoPut them on github or dropbox?
- 9erdelta 10y agoPutting them on github would be really cool.
- Medowar 10y agoPut them on archive.org? https://archive.org/upload/ https://archive.org/upload/
- malux85 10y agoSend the scans to me - I'll do any cleaning, compression, documenting, then put them up on github and give you a shout out. My contact details are on my profile :)
- mentatghola 10y agoPlease put a link when you get them scanned and hosted!
- state 10y agoThis is fantastic. I wonder what the contemporary equivalent is.
- sharmi 10y agoI would like to know what the modern equivalent of this is too. Obviously blogs are there. But it is not for me but my kid. Something that can pique his interest.
- matt_o 10y agoI too would like to know of a modern equivalent. Magazines are able to deliver something that blogs often can't - like pieces of work that have been refined, and then refined again by an editor. Or diverse topics that still fall within a certain discipline. This is an itch that blogs can't seem to scratch for me.
- fit2rule 10y agoTried the PICO8 fanzine? http://pico8fanzine.bigcartel.com http://pico8fanzine.bigcartel.com Its tailored for PICO8, which is a 'fantasy console' in the same light as 80's 8-bit machines, but still .. its one of those 'zines that really takes you back once you get through an issue or two ..
- moosingin3space 10y agoDoes http://creativeapplications.net http://creativeapplications.net serve as an equivalent?
- rwallace 10y agoAh, this is one I missed back in the day! It looks interesting, but viewing the PDFs in Foxit, the pages are all black text on dark gray background. Is anyone else getting that? Any known fix? For reference, Byte scans from archive.org display correctly on my system.
- contingencies 10y agoHaha! "Several years ago it was all the rage to forecast when each computer maker was going to graduate from an 8-bit cpu to a 16-bit cpu. However, it turned out that consumers didn't need 16-bits and computer makers were really quite content to stay with 8-bit machines". https://ia601604.us.archive.org/3/items/creativecomputing-1982-04-a/Creative_Computing_v08_n04_1982_April.pdf https://ia601604.us.archive.org/3/items/creativecomputing-19...