[HN Gopher] Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
___________________________________________________________________
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
Author : kencausey
Score : 527 points
Date : 2023-06-06 00:39 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ascii.textfiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ascii.textfiles.com)
| kookamamie wrote:
| The site wasn't prepared for the incoming visitor tsunami,
| though.
| cout wrote:
| I wonder how feasible it would be to train an ai model to correct
| scanned pages, to avoid having to debind the magazines.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Uhh, to get the training set you would need a large collection
| of debound pages
| sprior wrote:
| I buy Computer Shopper for the articles - said no one ever.
| berbec wrote:
| Since it's been so long, I can't remember, but were there even
| articles - or was it just 999 pages of classified ads sold to
| the highest bidder?
| wmf wrote:
| They had to have articles to qualify as a real magazine,
| probably for reduced mailing rates.
| stonogo wrote:
| Most of the articles were product reviews, but I bought it
| for the BBS listings.
| whartung wrote:
| I have vague memories of counting the number of content pages
| against the advertising pages once, and it was at least 80%
| advertising.
| [deleted]
| dcminter wrote:
| I used to buy the British edition at least partially for the
| articles, but it could be a damned hard slog finding them.
|
| In fact a lot of the computer magazines tended in this
| direction - presumably the consolidation around the PC and the
| commoditization of it ate into margins as they all focused on
| the one (albeit growing) narrower topic.
|
| By the by, I often joke that I buy The Economist for the
| pictures (not true, but the captions are often very sly jokes).
| funnybeam wrote:
| Including a regular Linux column by Charlie Stross before he
| started writing novels
| bluedino wrote:
| Bob and Alice was a great column. There were some programming
| articles too, I learned my first compression algorithm from
| one!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That must be the Holy Grail of publishing. You're buying it
| _for the ads_. So nobody complains that it 's packed absolutely
| full of ads. _And_ they 're _selling_ it to you. That 's
| amazing. (And it was true! We _did_ want to see the ads!)
| daneel_w wrote:
| Admirable effort. Thanks for preserving history.
| Rediscover wrote:
| The regulars, including Don Lancaster, were great. I would drool
| over so many articles that I barely understood, and one of my
| goals for the next month were to get caught-up on some part of
| this tech that had escaped me.
|
| Computer Shopper was fantastic for guiding me to complement my
| more formal studies.
|
| OT: Does anyone else still use 6502/65c816's and TMS32C32's?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| UK Computer Shopper was awesome in the early 90s. Fat wodge of
| newsprint covering everything from ZX Spectrums to NeXT stations.
|
| I think I still have my copy of the issue where they reviewed the
| Sun IPX, ghods I wanted one of those...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all
| the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the
| process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a
| library is archived by essentially shredding the books and
| blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high
| speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together
| in software. It's a very fun book that cranks up to a
| surprisingly exciting ending.
| ibiza wrote:
| That's essentially how DNA sequencing works. The longest human
| chromosome (chr1) has about 250M bases. The DNA samples are
| sonicated to split them into small sequences, and then
| sequenced en mass 100-300bps at a time. The results are then
| reassembled into contigs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput...
| rbanffy wrote:
| True, but you wouldn't do that to the very last one
| chromosome in existence.
|
| Some of these tomes might well be the last copy out there.
| tetris11 wrote:
| The variability from one contig build to another is
| surprisingly big sometimes, lending some credit to the idea
| that Vernon's shotgun transcriptome approach probably has
| multiple "optimal" solutions.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is how the human visual system works.
| [deleted]
| kloch wrote:
| In the late 1990's I was curating a project to scan in every LEGO
| instruction and catalog booklet. One big problem was Moire
| patterns. 300dpi seemed to maximize the artifacts and higher dpi
| resulted in images that were too large to use on typical displays
| of the time (not to mention most users were on 28-56kbps modems!)
| I settled on recommending 100-150dpi which eliminated most of the
| artifacts but still gave usable image size/detail.
|
| Then there were concerns about what LEGO (lawyers) would think
| about it. Because of this it originally didn't have thumbnails or
| _any_ html on that part of the site. Just images in a directory
| structure exposed by mod_autoindex which give it a very
| utilitarian, non-commercial feel. Those fears were soon put to
| rest when I learned that LEGO customer service was referring
| people to the site when customers called in to request
| replacements for lost instructions.
|
| That archive lives on today at http://www.peeron.com/ (not my
| site)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is an awesome project!
|
| Library/archive/historical-preservation people these days, for a
| while now, generally don't use "scanners" to digitize historical
| printed/2D material images, but ordinary high-quality digital
| cameras, set on tripods, often downward-facing, and manual page-
| turning.
|
| There is various plans for DIY rigs for such on the internet, for
| instance here: https://www.diybookscanner.org/.
|
| (although that site seems to be unmaintained with many broken
| links, it has enough working links you should be able to get the
| idea. This was a much more popular hobbyist DIY thing a decade+
| ago, in the era of dawn of google books etc).
|
| I wonder if there were particular reasons OP went with a
| "scanner". it seems a lot of the challenge was finding an
| affordable scanner that could handle the material. Perhaps it
| ends up being much (much) faster per-page, especially if you are
| willing to destroy the original, and is so justified? (Even
| though they ended up having to do manual page feed, possibly
| still much faster?) Or if they just didn't think of camera-
| tripod-manually-turned-pages and know it was a (common) option?
| If it hasn't been considered, it might be worth considering,
| although the process they have seems to be working well -- the
| sample output is stunning!
| JellyBeanThief wrote:
| Here's the collection so far:
| https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computer+Shopp...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Glad someone is doing it. Passion projects drive tech.
| gumby wrote:
| The author is both barking mad and performing a very important
| service. Ephemera like the Comouter Shopper will be valuable to
| some historians in the future, and by its very nature this is
| something that needs to be preserved while it's just an
| amusement.
|
| the author is also self aware (cf the Byte episode) which is
| unusual.
|
| I am fascinated that the computer shopper never made the
| transition to the web. They could have been the ur-vertical site.
| This shows how pernicious path dependence is.
| dublin wrote:
| There was a 2 decade gap between Computer Shopper's desire to
| go digital (they did create a fairly useless CD version later)
| and the ability of networks and browsers to even poorly render
| digital content. Even flipping pages today at the archive.org
| link isn't nearly as speedy as flipping real pages...
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| I loved Computer Shopper. I regularly bought the UK version in
| the 90s just to gawps at all those adverts and dream about buying
| my ultimate PC.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| What is the value of digitizing computer shopper?
| textfiles wrote:
| Read the room, and by the room, I mean this thread.
| [deleted]
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Apart from nostalgia, it contains a staggering amount of
| information about historical PC pricing and hardware
| availability that (to my knowledge) isn't really documented
| anywhere else. Sure, Wikipedia can tell you the official launch
| date of the Intel Pentium, but Computer Shopper can tell you
| when the price actually dropped to something reasonable, when
| cheap motherboards for it started pouring out of no-name
| manufacturers, when vendors stopped bothering to advertise 486
| hardware, etc..
| VincentEvans wrote:
| Thanks for the genuine answer.
| analog31 wrote:
| What a wonderful resource. When I was in grad school, somebody
| would buy the latest Computer Shopper and it would be passed
| around as needed. You really didn't need a brand new copy, so the
| old ones were passed around too. Sometimes it just gave you an
| idea of what could be built, and what kind of planning was
| needed. And payment / shipment were nontrivial in those days.
| intrasight wrote:
| Info didn't age as fast then. The same products were being
| sold, and for about the same price, for MANY months. And there
| just weren't very many products. A full-page ad in a pretty
| large font could list every product that existed in the
| consumer space.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Considering the prices adjusted for inflation, and how little
| computers could do out of the box beyond the business
| applications they were designed for in that era, it was really
| quite an expensive hobby to be a hacker!
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I can't even wrap my head around some of these prices... One of
| those pages for "February 1986" has an ad for "diskettes" box
| of 10 priced between $1195 and $2995. Are these what I think
| they are, regular floppy disks for almost $300 each?
|
| Edit: that must have been a typo, I see prices in the same
| issue of about $1/disk.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| I got an Atari STE in 1988, it used double-sided regular
| density 3.5" disks, with a capability of 720kB each, and back
| then it was a bargain to find no-name ones for ~$1, while the
| quality name-brand ones (Verbatim! Maxell!) cost about the
| double.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I saw that, too. They are missing a decimal point. 11.95 and
| 29.95.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| IIRC $300 each was 1 GB zip disks in the middle 1990's.
| BooneJS wrote:
| I think I've been paying close to the same price for computers
| for 25 years. Moose's Law and relentless miniaturization and
| cost optimization are the only reason why.
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004015/http://ascii.text...
| mindcrime wrote:
| This... is fugging amazing.
|
| No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to
| remember the heyday of _Computer Shopper_ won 't get it
| (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says,
| practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like
| finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing
| home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard,
| some RAM, maybe a Sound Blaster card, etc. for that sweet new PC
| you were planning to build. And the BBS listings... A new BBS
| appearing in there, IN YOUR LOCAL CALLING AREA was a huge deal.
|
| I know the younger folks probably don't get the idea of "long
| distance" or probably even the idea of phone usage being metered
| and billed per unit, but back in the day calling a BBS that was
| long-distance was a good way to rack up a huge phone bill, and
| righteously piss off your parents (if you lived at home). Of
| course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they existed in the
| 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience store in the middle
| of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and "beige box" off a COCOT
| (customer owned coin operated telephone) to make those calls. I
| might have been guilty of doing something like that...
|
| Anyway, Computer Shopper was a big deal to a lot of people for a
| long time, and I'm personally thrilled to see these issues being
| preserved so some of that legacy can live on. Browsing the old
| issues online will never give one quite the same experience, but
| it's good that they'll be around.
| miroljub wrote:
| [flagged]
| jimjimjim wrote:
| [flagged]
| yard2010 wrote:
| [flagged]
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I think what a lot of younger people also don't realize is how
| gigantic a single issue of computer shopper was. They were as
| thick as phone books with thin weight pages. I remember
| multiple issues being well into the thousands of pages.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Once Computer Shopper became huge phone-book-sized things I
| quit buying them because I just didn't have the room or the
| time - fortunately our college library subscribed and I could
| peruse it there, but generally I'd read Byte, Creative
| Computing or Dr. Dobb's Journal instead. I recall when CS was
| kind of a newspaper prior to being a bound magazine format.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I used to use old ones as rifle target backstops. .22LR would
| not penetrate a single issue.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's very brave to mention such heinous crimes in this
| discussion.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I should brag on my 1988 - 1996 complete run of "PC
| Magazine" too
| zakki wrote:
| I don't think younger people understand your description of
| how thick Computer Shopper was. Because most likely they
| don't know how thick is a phone book ;D
| function_seven wrote:
| For those that don't know, a phone book was often about
| twice as thick as a Thomas Guide.
|
| That should help.
| zepolen wrote:
| So around 6 iphones?
| mindcrime wrote:
| And a Thomas Guide was about as thick as 8 or 9 J.C.
| Whitney catalogs.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| 15-20 Farmer's Almanacs.
| keithalewis wrote:
| That couldn't even fit on a floppy disk. You know, that
| icon thing kids click on to save things.
| pmontra wrote:
| Another set of imperial units unknown to us Europeans?
| :-) How tick was that, a couple of inches / 5 cm?
| zem wrote:
| 1/2000 of a football field, give or take
| daveoc64 wrote:
| American Football, or soccer?
| digging wrote:
| It would be about 6 American Football compact disk jewel
| cases.
| zem wrote:
| American of course, the other sort isn't a unit of
| measurement!
| modriano wrote:
| I've been fully spoiled by PCPartPicker [0], which just
| invisibly filters out parts that aren't compatible with the
| components already selected for a build. The idea of having to
| manually keep track of every compatibility check at every
| component interface sounds like a path to debugging hell. On
| the other hand, that makes success a far stronger nerdcred
| signal.
|
| [0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/
| showerst wrote:
| The sheer variety of weird and wonderful ways things could be
| incompatible is really tamed by modern standards. I remember
| spending days as a kid working out obscure IRQ conflicts
| blindly flipping plastic jumpers, or editing config files.
|
| I don't miss it!
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| I remember when this was just something the creator was
| messing with. Its come a long way.
|
| Parts compatability isn't really too hard. Pull up the mobo
| specs and make sure your ram timings, CPU socket, PCI, and
| power demand all line up.
| pkphilip wrote:
| Yep, been there, done that.
| datavirtue wrote:
| It was the one thing I carried everywhere as a teenager.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| >>" Of course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they
| existed in the 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience
| store in the middle of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and
| "beige box" off a COCOT (customer owned coin operated
| telephone) to make those calls. I might have been guilty of
| doing something like that..."
|
| Ohhh man! I was just a few years too late for that but I
| remember reading and hearing about it. It was a dream of mine!
| Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction
| boxes for the bell of it.
| lightspot21 wrote:
| >Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into
| junction boxes _for the bell of it_.
|
| I'd be very surprised if this wasn't accidental given the
| character of this site, but holy moly is the pun fitting.
| Congrats.
| bane wrote:
| I've said it before, The IA is a crown jewel of the internet.
| But now I'll add "and God Bless Jason Scott".
|
| This might be one of the most important historical pricing
| repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's
| done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives
| or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's
| tracking the emergence and transition between technologies,
| correlation against production yield information, corporate
| histories...this could be a backbone all other North American
| computer history could be hung off of.
|
| It's a time long gone, but 2009 wasn't _that_ long ago, and
| reaching from the beginning of personal computing to then is an
| amazing thing.
|
| edit: wow, and I mean _wow_ the results look great
| https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...
|
| edit2: WHAT, THEY'RE ALSO OCR'd???!?!?! Holy Fuck
|
| edit3: if you don't, you should listen to Jason's podcast, it
| really helps get into the mind of an amazing human
| https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526
| textfiles wrote:
| finger guns
| scott1701 wrote:
| You can just smell the pages as you flip through.
| dublin wrote:
| This is a perfect example of how our technologies have let
| us down - Computer Shopper and the like (including
| newspapers) were useful precisely _because_ they could be
| quickly _browsed_ and flipped through.
|
| That's not really possible with the wretched things we call
| "browsers" today - Heck, even with a high-bandwidth
| connection and a nice 4K screen to display it, I still
| can't nearly as readily flip through pages of the IA
| Computer Shopper scans as I could through the actual
| physical media. Browsing, along with its attendant and
| deliberate page-turning to move on to something new, have
| been replaced by endless scrolling of sameness. The Ads are
| all dynamic, so even though they're the things that catch
| your eye the most, they're not usable as navigation context
| markers anymore - note how different all the ads were, and
| how the uniqueness page layout became something a litlte
| bit memorable, so you could more easily flip back to re-
| find something you'd read a few dozen pages back.
|
| Browsing is an excellent quick, easy way to MAKE
| CONNECTIONS between lots of different data coming from lots
| of different sources. That sort of thing created much more
| well-rounded, smarter people, and society is poorer for
| having moved to overly structured media. (And ads are
| media, too (heck they're nearly all of Computer Shopper) -
| just _try_ going back to find an ad you saw on a site last
| week!) Static location context matters - humans are wired
| to think in terms of physical relativity, and our UIs give
| that up only at great cost...
| elaus wrote:
| I was skimming though the pages of this issue from 1986 and
| thought how those prices for hardware seem fairly reasonable.
| But looking it up, the inflation since 1986 was ~176%, so 1
| USD back then equals about 2.76 today.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| akudha wrote:
| _I work very long hours for the Internet Archive, and I am
| making a huge difference in the world working for them. It
| wouldn't be right or useful for me to take on any other job.
| I also don't want to be doing something like making "stuff"
| that I sell or otherwise speculate into some market. Leave
| aside I have these documentaries to finish, and time has to
| be short._
|
| from http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251
|
| In a world where people are rushing to pump out AI generated
| content, polluting the internet, all for a buck - people like
| Jason also exist. What a gem of a person!
| rbanffy wrote:
| _Saint Jason Scott of the Internet_ is how the machines
| will remember him.
| glotchimo wrote:
| Whenever asked what period I (a proverbial young person, SWE)
| would go back to if I had a time machine, I always answer with
| roughly this period. To be alive during those days to see the
| development of the shoulders I now stand on would be such a
| treat, as I'm sure anecdotes like these only scratch the
| surface of all the stories to be told.
|
| That said, if any of you oldheads have links to such things, do
| share - always curious to learn more about the beige age.
| Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and I'm here for that secondhand.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| I think this book captures a good bit of the spirit
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984598.Masters_of_Decept.
| ..
| jhbadger wrote:
| Eh, while the media seemed to be into "hackers" in the
| sense of people breaking into systems (and either messing
| them up or just to do it for bragging rights), that wasn't
| what most of us were into -- instead we were interested in
| writing software to get the most of the hardware we had
| (and used "hacker" in the old-school sense of expert
| coders).
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| dhosek wrote:
| Back in the 90s, my brother actually had a _subscription_ to
| _Computer Shopper_ (he had a side hustle building PCs for
| entertainment industry folks). I only ever bought it if I was
| planning on building something which was rare because computers
| were _expensive_ back then. The last PC I built literally did
| not have two components from the same vendor. To be honest, I
| don't miss those days. Say what you like about the "Apple tax,"
| it's very nice to have one company who will take responsibility
| for things not working and my experience, at least, has been
| that they stand behind their products (at least as long as
| they're under AppleCare).
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Say what you like about the "Apple tax," it's very nice to
| have one company who will take responsibility for things not
| working
|
| Where's the fun in that? Building your own PC is a _thrill_ -
| budgeting, chosing components, excitedly waiting for each to
| arrive or picking them from shelf, assembling everything and
| then pressing the power button to power everything up for the
| first time. Followed by your heart sinking when nothing
| happens _" ohfuckohfuckohfuck, did I I just burn something
| out - there isn't any smoke, but I hope it's not the
| processor"._ Reseat everything, reconnect cables, get an some
| sign of life, but it's an error code - progress. Multiple
| attempts at fixing the error and _finally_ get a POST screen.
| Apple can 't sell that emotional experience or sense of
| ownership - self-built machines have a personality.
|
| The extra RAM and/or cores I get from a self-build vs.
| equally priced Apple computer is just a bonus. Modern
| standards make surprise incompatibilities less likely than in
| the past, looking at the specs works 99.9% of the times
| dublin wrote:
| The excitement of those old days is still very much alive
| in the Raspberry Pi community. I just configured a new
| PiBox server to do some fairly serious work, including
| serving as the archive NAS for two ne startups. (It's more
| than capable of doing that work - it has more CPU power,
| more RAM, and more storage than Chevron's Crays had when I
| worked there in the '90s!)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The ads were much more than just "new version of the old thing"
| (motherboards, RAM, sound cards, video cards). About every
| issue, there would be something (or more than one) that I never
| even imagined you could do with a computer (or, usually, make
| into a computer peripheral). It was mind blowing to see, over
| and over, here was something _completely new_ (or at least new
| to me). _And_ there was something I 'd seen before for less
| money, and something I'd seen before with better performance.
| Over and over, month after month. It was like watching the
| future on fast-forward.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _...and "beige box" off a COCOT..._
|
| I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or
| just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The
| idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We
| only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it
| worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to
| call)
|
| A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the
| one end. You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could
| also use it on any telephone line.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I definitely mean "beige box." Red boxes were (mainly?) for
| telephone company phones that would recognize the coin tones.
| Those phones had a different line "class of service" at the
| switch end and the critical point is that red-boxing was the
| only way (post blue-box era anyway) to get free calls off of
| them. Well, at least that I knew of. But a COCOT had all the
| "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the line was
| a normal line, so if you clipped in at the demarc box,
| "upstream" of the actual phone, you were on a plain old phone
| line (with long-distance service) that you could use to your
| heart's content. And by the time frame I'm talking about,
| there weren't a lot of the red-box'able telephone company
| payphones around in our area.
|
| If some COCOT's were also susceptible to red-boxing, that's
| something we never discovered. To be fair though, it never
| even occurred to me to check. I just had it burned into my
| brain at some point that red-boxing was for telco phones and
| not COCOT's.[1] In hindsight, that was quite possibly
| folklore that was wrong.
|
| _You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also
| use it on any telephone line._
|
| Yep. It just worked out that a convenience store in the
| middle of nowhere with a COCOT out in the parking lot was a
| good scenario for doing this kind of thing without getting
| caught. Or so I'm told... :-)
|
| [1]: https://www.tech-faq.com/red-box.html
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Sometime I feel sad that younger generations won't have the
| excitements of early days of PC and sometimes I feel they might
| be better off spending their time on something that is more
| productive. One thing for sure, that era is gone and all The most
| of the enablers of that era are also history now.
|
| Amount of time I spend reading and researching which motherboard
| and RAM would best fit together makes me smile from time to time.
| Or the amount of time I spend searching for extra memory chips
| for my trident card...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 1983: you can use it as a word processor
|
| 2023: give it a prompt and it will write it on demand
|
| 2063: welp there goes the Solar System
| doctor_radium wrote:
| I was a Commodore guy in the 80's and 90's so didn't go for
| Computer Shopper as often as the rest of you, but did buy the
| occasional copy.
|
| Having said that, today when I encounter the phrase "high
| capacity magazines" in the news, I chuckle because firearms isn't
| what first comes to mind.
| bglazer wrote:
| I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics
| research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine
| grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in
| standards for components, performance specs of components over
| time. All at the time of the Cambrian explosion of computing
|
| Also wow this is a gargantuan effort. I scanned thee equivalent
| of like one issue of Computer Shopper one time and it was
| painful. Kudos to the author.
| reaperman wrote:
| For any moderately large scale book scanning effort:
| https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...
| textfiles wrote:
| That prototype "only" damages 70% of the pages.
| reaperman wrote:
| Really? A comment on the page I linked said:
|
| > The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned
| have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page,
| but they've done some work on preventing problems.
|
| Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would
| only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your
| numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed
| thesis is valid: with historical artifacts you can only
| accept a lower % of damaged pages than human-powered
| scanning would cause.
| [deleted]
| textfiles wrote:
| I assure you, I hate that thing. It has dogged me and the
| Internet Archive for over a decade. It is not just
| vaporware, but dangerous.
| LeonM wrote:
| The Feb 1986 issue linked in the article caught my attention,
| since it is the month I was born.
|
| Page 10 starts with a story of someone planning to build a case
| for the Apple I, to take it to a computer show. The guy called
| Steve Jobs, and Jobs offered him to send the new tape interface,
| which Wozniak just finished. It is an utterly amazing read!
|
| https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...
| smilbandit wrote:
| ah the hours spent building the perfect computer on paper using
| arbitrarily decided limit of money I was never going to have.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > debinding
|
| When I was in school, there was a binding shop nearby which had a
| huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine, only
| shallower, that just sliced through thick books like butter. They
| stuck the book in a vice grip, turned a wheel which brought that
| beautiful sharp heavy blade down on the hopeless book stuck in
| the grip below and the paper shavings just blossomed out of the
| other side as the blade did its job.
|
| One of the favorite things for us to do was to bring an old book
| to the shop and ask then to shave off few millimeters on each
| side (except the spine of course) - the frayed/yellow bits were
| gone and your book was new and born again :) This also was a
| great strategy if you wanted to reduce the dimensions of your
| book. Obviously only works with paperbacks and can't be repeated
| more than 3-4 times. I loved it then.
|
| > In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the
| glued issues of Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue
| starts to become slightly liquid and then carefully pulling the
| pages apart from each other, placing them on a large table I'm
| working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull
| them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It's a huge mess,
| and with hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work.
|
| I wonder if instead of using heat-gun to de-glue (?), it would be
| easier to just shave off an ever thin slice of that spine?
|
| (sorry if that was too gruesome for you).
| pythonb3sss wrote:
| > huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine
|
| My local binding shop actually still operates one of those.
| CSSer wrote:
| Something like this?
| https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/products/martin-yale-7000e
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Similar but 4-5 times as bigger - it could have chopped my 12
| year old body in half. A beast of a machine.
|
| (I don't know what has come over me - my mind is only
| producing grisly descriptions)
| bane wrote:
| Probably more like one of these, a hydraulic guillotine
| cutter.
|
| https://youtu.be/RZD0XHp75S4
|
| https://youtu.be/BvLk6-OugIc
|
| These will _easily_ take a hand off so most of the machines
| designed after the mid-80s required the operator to press two
| buttons as a safety to cut and a pedal to initiate the clamp.
| The older ones from the 70s just required a push on a pair of
| foot pedals, or a pedal and a single button -- which was
| obviously stupid. Once the safer machines came around we got
| those.
|
| I used to operate one as a kid in middle/high school before I
| went off to college. You can fit measure to sub-mm precision
| before clamping and making the cut. It was a really beautiful
| thing to see it cleave the edges off of several inches of
| paper like a hot knife cutting through room temperature
| butter. A real shame filling up bins and bins and bins of
| cuttings to toss in the trash (this was before recycling was
| a common thing).
|
| Changing the blades was quite the ordeal and you had to do it
| frequency to send off for regrinding. At least on the
| machines we had. They're basically 20+lb razer blades.
|
| Source: I grew up in a family printing business and we had
| machines like this to cut the margins and printer marks off
| of the edges of fresh printed material to help get it ready
| for binding or delivery. Almost every printed page goes
| through something like this.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Oh, those machines are pretty satisfying to use and watch.
| In the 00's I did a lot of IT support for print shops (I
| still hate the RIP server and the Fiery, although I haven't
| seen one for 20 years) and the guillotines fascinated me.
| lidavidm wrote:
| Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older)
| Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to
| melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the
| glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page
| spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a
| lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't
| want to damage the pages, even if the damage seems
| infinitesimal.
|
| It doesn't happen so much anymore for manga since things are
| mostly digital. Though some publishers still publish at
| 1200x800 (looking at you, Hakusensha!) or worse (I think one
| site uses like, 900x600?). Mostly these days this would only
| happen for self-published works (which are still distributed in
| limited quantities and in physical format only, oftentimes). Or
| apparently publishers occasionally just...lose the digital
| files. (Though I can't find where I read this anymore.)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads.
|
| A very good point
| textfiles wrote:
| Also, people have already contributed thousands for this
| project, asking for a cutty-cutty machine is a bit much,
| especially when I'm really getting good with the heat gun.
| ISL wrote:
| Scientists routinely request more grant money for
| research whose difficulty exceeds initial estimates.
| You're already doing an incredible thing; it is okay to
| ask for more assistance.
| coverband wrote:
| So many pages were the same unchanged ads in the Shopper
| every month. Can't you add in some prefiltering for those
| to reduce the number of pages actually needed to scan?
| (Sorry for hijacking the thread...)
| textfiles wrote:
| No
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Upvoted with extra strong mouse click on account of
| cutty-cutty machine.
| fwlr wrote:
| If you are okay with cutting the spine off, you don't
| need a big hydraulic cutter to do it (even though it is
| objectively the coolest way). Clamping a straightedge to
| the book and running a knife along that edge will cut a
| handful of pages very cleanly, you just run the knife
| through over and over. A metal ruler and a Stanley knife
| will do this just fine - heavy pressure on the ruler and
| light passes with the Stanley knife. (This is what
| amateur bookbinders do to trim the edges of books they're
| binding when they don't have access to proper
| guillotines.)
| modernerd wrote:
| Hydraulic drive paper cutters are great for high-volume print
| finishing (I used several in print production for about two
| years), but I'd be wary of them for this use case:
|
| - Waste is high. To trim off a spine, you likely have to take
| more of the margin than you'd like (if you trim too close to
| the edge of a glued spine, the risk is higher that you may
| bludgeon the stack of pages under pressure instead of cutting
| it). Not great for double page spreads or Computer Shopper's
| anaemic margins.
|
| - Failure rate is non-zero. If you're cutting a fresh print
| run, no big deal, you can reprint if you screw up. If you're
| cutting rare magazines, you probably don't want to lose many to
| slippage or mis-cuts.
|
| - The blade needs regular sharpening, and it's not something
| you can easily do in a home workshop, or that you probably want
| to do (huge heavy razor blades turn out to be quite dangerous).
|
| What _might_ help Jason more is a "thermal binding machine",
| designed to bind or debind a glued spine. He could (in theory)
| leave each mag in the debinder for a set time to heat the glue,
| then pry the pages free. Not a huge improvement over a
| hairdryer, but at least more hands-free, especially if people
| could donate or loan multiple machines.
| rbanffy wrote:
| What if instead of cutting, we sanded them? The pressure on
| the surfaces would be smaller and it could remove just enough
| to debind the volume.
| modernerd wrote:
| Nice idea but I would be worried about tearing.
|
| I don't know what the actual paper weight is but it looks
| in the "bible paper and cheap newsprint" range (~40-60gsm),
| which will probably rip as soon as a belt/orbital sander
| crosses the glue line into the looser leaves (and you have
| to cross the glue line to debind, and by nature that line
| isn't normally straight, because glue does not melt
| evenly). You also destroy the spine, making it harder to
| identify issues at a glance.
|
| A thermal binding machine would likely melt the glue in
| 45-90 seconds without those risks. And you might even be
| able to rebind after the scan with fresh glue strips using
| the same machine, assuming you don't have to cut the cover
| wrap.
| gwern wrote:
| I briefly experiment with that for books before switching
| to a guillotine. It was slower, and made a mess. Even when
| I thought all the dust/grit was gone, some snuck into the
| scans anyway. For softer lower-quality aged acid-attacked
| newsprint-style magazines like this, I imagine the mess
| would be even worse.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Someone's gone and done it. My god.
|
| You crazy bastard. I love you.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The cheap, cheap paper is a nightmare to run through a scanner
|
| Not to mention having a faint mirror image of the other side. You
| need a dark background and a lot of light on the front to catch
| as little of it as possible.
|
| And, then, one could add some smarts to try to align and subtract
| the image of the other side of the page to get an even cleaner
| image.
|
| Now, just imagine if they kept an archive of their photo plates
| (or, better for later issues, PDF copies). By 2009 that's the
| very least one should have.
| dmbaggett wrote:
| I distinctly remember buying a _1GB_ hard drive in 1992 for
| _$1300_ via an ad in Computer Shopper. And that was a really good
| price!
| russellbeattie wrote:
| When I was in college in 1991, I used to get Computer Shopper and
| spend hours scouring it for a laptop (not a common thing then). I
| wanted one so bad, but was sooo broke you can't even imagine.
| There were always random resellers getting rid of old laptops and
| I'd spend hours trying to figure out which one I might get. "That
| 286 with the flip-up half-screen black and white liquid crystal
| display is relatively cheap... but so clunky. Maybe I should save
| up for a 386? But all the affordable ones have horrible passive
| LCD screens that ghost. Wait... maybe if I sell a kidney..."
|
| I never ended up ordering one, but I remember fondly the hours of
| dreaming about it.
| dublin wrote:
| I drooled over the DG/One and the Kaypro 2000 - two of the very
| first true "laptop" computers. (No, the GriD doesn't count - it
| had to be plugged in!)
|
| Way out of my budget, so I settled for a surplus, but new
| Commodore SX-64 luggable, with a fancy built-in 5-inch COLOR
| screen! Did the usual Commodore stuff on it, then got GEOS
| (made a C-64 a reasonable facsimile of a Macintosh - really)
| and used it to write all my final college papers and even my
| first resume. I still have it (in its original packing) up in a
| closet - need to pull it down sometime and figure out why the
| video sync doesn't work...
| dcminter wrote:
| I find myself doing this with modern configurators from e.g.
| System76 even though I have no earthly use for such an over-
| powered system.
|
| The Maplin Catalogue back in the day was my choice for idle
| window-shopping; one could page through it for the components
| of some very castles in the sky imagined diy computer or gadget
| - none of which I could have successfully built even if I'd had
| the budget. Top nerd nostalgia.
| snthd wrote:
| I thought the point in debinding was to use an autofeeder - to
| make the actual scanning less labor intensive.
|
| Wouldn't a camera based scanner be better? It still requires
| manual page turning, but will save on the prep work and
| destroying the magazines, even if just to sell on.
|
| The paper and ink quality will present they're own issues, but
| maybe those will be quicker to solve than the debinding and page
| feeding process.
|
| https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem
|
| https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/13580909821897195...
|
| https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sc...
|
| https://www.diybookscanner.org/
|
| The effort here to preserve history though is incredible.
| toyg wrote:
| With very thick books like those, debinding is necessary even
| just to get a good straight scan.
| UberFly wrote:
| There needs to be a nerdy online official saint or knighthood
| title for people like this.
| dcminter wrote:
| Sounds like a job for...
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calcul...
|
| (Also: completely agree - this stuff is going to be a fabulous
| resource for future researchers and meanwhile the rest of us
| reap the benefit by indulging our nostalgia - I'm full of
| admiration)
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(page generated 2023-06-06 23:02 UTC)