Personal Computer World scans!
Personal Computer World scans!
Finally!
In a rather convoluted path, someone I know has got his relative to finally share a ton of PCW scans to us. They haven't arrived yet, but I'm told its a complete archive of every PCW, issue 1 to sometime in 1984. I had a few PDF's 2 or 3 years ago, but he wouldnt share more.. the PDF's are big, some are 50mb, some 800mb.
The condition of the old man to share the whole set now is someone puts them all up on the internet. I said they would go to archive.org so the joy is spread far and wide.
Anyone on here got fast fibre upload and knows how to upload a collection? and then share the link on here once they are up? I am in a 'BT not-spot' so estimating the size c. 20gb? Of uploads would take me til 2025! When the hard drive arrives I'll post it on.
Excited?
In a rather convoluted path, someone I know has got his relative to finally share a ton of PCW scans to us. They haven't arrived yet, but I'm told its a complete archive of every PCW, issue 1 to sometime in 1984. I had a few PDF's 2 or 3 years ago, but he wouldnt share more.. the PDF's are big, some are 50mb, some 800mb.
The condition of the old man to share the whole set now is someone puts them all up on the internet. I said they would go to archive.org so the joy is spread far and wide.
Anyone on here got fast fibre upload and knows how to upload a collection? and then share the link on here once they are up? I am in a 'BT not-spot' so estimating the size c. 20gb? Of uploads would take me til 2025! When the hard drive arrives I'll post it on.
Excited?
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I'd be interested to see them, because I remember the first ever computer magazine I looked at was a PCW special which did a round-up of all the home computers available at the time (1983), including the Electron. I would love to read that again.
Thing is, PCW scans don't seem to be available anywhere on the web. I wonder why that is? Is it because the copyright owners are not happy?
Thing is, PCW scans don't seem to be available anywhere on the web. I wonder why that is? Is it because the copyright owners are not happy?
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Yes.
Excited.
Lee
Excited.
Lee
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Great news! I have fibre -- my upload speed is about 18 Mbps, so not blazingly fast, I don't think, but it'll do at a pinch.iainjh wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 1:19 pm Anyone on here got fast fibre upload and knows how to upload a collection? and then share the link on here once they are up? I am in a 'BT not-spot' so estimating the size c. 20gb? Of uploads would take me til 2025! When the hard drive arrives I'll post it on.
Please PM me if you don't get a better offer from someone with a faster line.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
This is excellent news.
You might want to consider passing them on to American Radion History, as they already have some issues scanned:
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Pe ... _World.htm
You might want to consider passing them on to American Radion History, as they already have some issues scanned:
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Pe ... _World.htm
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I'll PM lurkio! thank you you're doing the nation a service.
Hoglet - hopefully the american history site can be advised once they are up?
as it happens ive just received the 1st set in todays post! on a DVD! More to follow. I'l ping lurkio right now
this is wonderful
edit - thanks for that link Hoglet as one of the scans is incomplete, the one on that site seems better! I'll fix it
Hoglet - hopefully the american history site can be advised once they are up?
as it happens ive just received the 1st set in todays post! on a DVD! More to follow. I'l ping lurkio right now
this is wonderful
edit - thanks for that link Hoglet as one of the scans is incomplete, the one on that site seems better! I'll fix it
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I have a dog-slow connection, but I do have experience uploading > 500 items to Internet Archive.
I'd recommend using the ia command-line tool for batch uploads. Upload each one as a separate item just as a PDF. Don't worry about OCR: archive.org does that automatically. If you'd rather, ia allows you to script from a CSV file. You want these in "Community Texts"
Maybe ping Jason Scott (@textfiles) that these are coming: PCW has been a bit of a holy grail for collectors, and finally getting these available will be huge news. Not just for the likes of us who like ripping off Morgan Computers' impeccable lineart ads.
thank you, thank you for doing this!
I'd recommend using the ia command-line tool for batch uploads. Upload each one as a separate item just as a PDF. Don't worry about OCR: archive.org does that automatically. If you'd rather, ia allows you to script from a CSV file. You want these in "Community Texts"
Maybe ping Jason Scott (@textfiles) that these are coming: PCW has been a bit of a holy grail for collectors, and finally getting these available will be huge news. Not just for the likes of us who like ripping off Morgan Computers' impeccable lineart ads.
thank you, thank you for doing this!
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Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Well . . . That link lead me into 'brouse' mode - found the 1983 October issue and the Electron review (page 160) I don't believe I've ever seen an issue 1 PCBhoglet wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 2:24 pm This is excellent news.
You might want to consider passing them on to American Radion History, as they already have some issues scanned:
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Pe ... _World.htm
One thing I did notice . . . the number of adverts!!! Used to love reading them - and dreaming, of course
Dave H
Available: ARA II : ARA III-JR/PR : ABR : AP5 : AP6 : ABE : ATI : MGC : Plus 1 Support ROM : Plus 3 2nd DA : Prime's Plus 3 ROM/RAM : Pegasus 400 : Prime's MRB : ARCIN32 : Cross-32
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
posties been, and a bunch of DVD's arrived!
Hoglet, that site you shared was fantastic, has filled in a swathe of 1979 issues.
does anyone know of any more? missing issues that spring to sight are:
1981 missing july oct
1982 missing feb nov
1983 missing jan feb july nov dec
dont ask yet which are on the DVD's, as still copying.. 22gb+ of files.
Hoglet, that site you shared was fantastic, has filled in a swathe of 1979 issues.
does anyone know of any more? missing issues that spring to sight are:
1981 missing july oct
1982 missing feb nov
1983 missing jan feb july nov dec
dont ask yet which are on the DVD's, as still copying.. 22gb+ of files.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
It's fab for old electronics magazines, like:
- Electronics Today International
- Everyday Electronics
- Practical Electronics
- Elektor
- Wireless World
- Electronics - The Maplin Magazine
On the subject of computing magazines, Flax Cottage has a great archive of Computing Today.
Dave
Last edited by hoglet on Thu May 28, 2020 12:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I believe there are quite a few Acorn program listings in PCW that have yet to be archived (see for example https://ukfree.tv/documents/pcw/#Programs).
- daveejhitchins
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Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Who's going to let Lee know . . .
Dave H
Dave H
Available: ARA II : ARA III-JR/PR : ABR : AP5 : AP6 : ABE : ATI : MGC : Plus 1 Support ROM : Plus 3 2nd DA : Prime's Plus 3 ROM/RAM : Pegasus 400 : Prime's MRB : ARCIN32 : Cross-32
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Don't worry Dave... I have that list
I think I may have more typing to do soon....
Lee
I think I may have more typing to do soon....
Lee
- daveejhitchins
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Re: Personal Computer World scans!
As usual . . .
That's just triggered a memory from BITD . . . When we took over the production of the Plus 1, from Acorn, we didn't have the source for the User Guide or the time/expertise to produce it economically (two finger typing is slow!). So I ended up asking friends if they knew of a touch typist who had some spare time. We soon found one and I provided an Electron, Plus 1 and AP4 for them to type it in for us. Worked out well. IIRC it only took her a few evenings. The lady ended up doing lots of other work for us.
Dave H
Available: ARA II : ARA III-JR/PR : ABR : AP5 : AP6 : ABE : ATI : MGC : Plus 1 Support ROM : Plus 3 2nd DA : Prime's Plus 3 ROM/RAM : Pegasus 400 : Prime's MRB : ARCIN32 : Cross-32
- flaxcottage
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Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Er ... Computing Today and Games Computing.hoglet wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 5:17 pm
On the subject of computing magazines, Flax Cottage has a great archive of Practical Computing.
Dave
Could do with copies of July 1985 to September 1985 for Computing Today and July 194 and February 1985 for Games Computing, he announces in anticipation.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Apologies, for some reason I keep confusing Practical Computing with Computing Today. Post corrected!
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
This is really exciting news. Ironically, when my interest in the beeb waned in the early 90's I bought a PC, initially for work but then found some great games like Doom and Quake. I also bought Elite Frontier but never really got into it. I bought PCW every month until its demise. I eventually had to chuck them all out, with all the adverts in they were fairly hefty and took up a huge amount of room. Now it feels like I've come full circle as I'm interested particularly in the early issues and the 8-bit scene.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I’ve have three A5 complication books of some of the more interesting PCW reviews and adverts which include quite a few pieces from Acorn:
Acorn Atom Benchtest July 1980
Atom advert Oct 1980
BBC Micro Benchtest Jan 1982
Acorn Econet Benchtest Jul 1981
BBC Micro advert Jan 1983
Tube 32bit news Aug 1982
Acorn Electron Benchtest Oct 1983
Elite advert Oct 1984
Torch Unicorn advert Jul 1984
Acorn Electron advert Jul 1984
BBC Micro advert Jan 1985
BBC Second Processor advert Nov 1984
Acorn A3000 Benchtest Jul 1989
BBC Master Benchtest Mar 1986
Article on RISC Nov 1985
Acorn Music 500 review May 1985
Acorn ABC 310 Benchtest Apr 1985
There are loads of other reviews of classic computers, plus probably a bunch of Acorn things I’ve missed.
If anyone wants me to take high resolution photos of the articles I’d be happy to, but I don’t have the kit to scan them.
Acorn Atom Benchtest July 1980
Atom advert Oct 1980
BBC Micro Benchtest Jan 1982
Acorn Econet Benchtest Jul 1981
BBC Micro advert Jan 1983
Tube 32bit news Aug 1982
Acorn Electron Benchtest Oct 1983
Elite advert Oct 1984
Torch Unicorn advert Jul 1984
Acorn Electron advert Jul 1984
BBC Micro advert Jan 1985
BBC Second Processor advert Nov 1984
Acorn A3000 Benchtest Jul 1989
BBC Master Benchtest Mar 1986
Article on RISC Nov 1985
Acorn Music 500 review May 1985
Acorn ABC 310 Benchtest Apr 1985
There are loads of other reviews of classic computers, plus probably a bunch of Acorn things I’ve missed.
If anyone wants me to take high resolution photos of the articles I’d be happy to, but I don’t have the kit to scan them.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I've done a test upload of the first issue of Personal Computer World. Thanks to iainjh for sending me the files!
Is the metadata okay? I've tried to keep the same title-format as the existing uploads in the "Personal Computer World (UK)" Collection:
Can I add my uploads to that collection (if it's the right one)? Or do I have to wait for, or ask, an Archive.org admin to do it?
Btw, I uploaded manually, using the webUI, and the upload was painfully slow! Perhaps the commandline tool is faster, or easier to use because you can queue up a number of uploads in one go? I don't know -- I've never used it.
Is the metadata okay? I've tried to keep the same title-format as the existing uploads in the "Personal Computer World (UK)" Collection:
Can I add my uploads to that collection (if it's the right one)? Or do I have to wait for, or ask, an Archive.org admin to do it?
Btw, I uploaded manually, using the webUI, and the upload was painfully slow! Perhaps the commandline tool is faster, or easier to use because you can queue up a number of uploads in one go? I don't know -- I've never used it.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
I haven't received any feedback on my test upload (see previous post), so I'll assume it's okay and I'll continue uploading the rest of the issues in the same way.
One oddity: the September 1978 issue is only seven pages long! The extant pages include the front cover but otherwise seem to be a random sampling of the original pages from that issue of the magazine.
EDIT: More uploads:
One oddity: the September 1978 issue is only seven pages long! The extant pages include the front cover but otherwise seem to be a random sampling of the original pages from that issue of the magazine.
EDIT: More uploads:
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Hi everyone
1st, THANKS to Lurkio for undertaking this for us! I assume everyone's as excited as I am to see these in the wild?
Please can some volunteers check Lurkio's links and see if they look good to you? he has 25gb of uploads on the way for us and needs your help.
feedback in this thread.
thanks
1st, THANKS to Lurkio for undertaking this for us! I assume everyone's as excited as I am to see these in the wild?
Please can some volunteers check Lurkio's links and see if they look good to you? he has 25gb of uploads on the way for us and needs your help.
feedback in this thread.
thanks
Last edited by iainjh on Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
1978-06 looks good, 78 pages
1978-07 also good, 80 pages
lurkio, the sept issue here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/UK ... -S-OCR.pdf
looks good, do you want to substitute that one?
I'll restart on checking the files I have, and will post a note here if I see any others that are obviously short on pages
1978-07 also good, 80 pages
lurkio, the sept issue here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/UK ... -S-OCR.pdf
looks good, do you want to substitute that one?
I'll restart on checking the files I have, and will post a note here if I see any others that are obviously short on pages
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Hey - not bad! It looks great!
There's definitely something up with the PDF encoding of Issue 1. 65 pages should not be 768 MB at any useful resolution! But I understand (?) that you've received these scans from someone else so you don't have any control of the input. The colossal file size may be preventing the Internet Archive from creating a smaller OCR ("PDF with Text") version. The fact that it's extracted the text means that for the first time, the first issue of PCW is searchable on the web!
Regarding collections, it's more when an admin notices. I've already pinged Jason Scott, and I'll link him to the one(s) you've uploaded so he knows what to do with them. He may make you an admin of the PCW collection so you can upload directly. I see he's moved the files to "magazines".
On the metadata, how about:
will upload an item, create it, and populate most of the useful fields in one go.
(I split the lines with \, you might want to avoid that)
There's definitely something up with the PDF encoding of Issue 1. 65 pages should not be 768 MB at any useful resolution! But I understand (?) that you've received these scans from someone else so you don't have any control of the input. The colossal file size may be preventing the Internet Archive from creating a smaller OCR ("PDF with Text") version. The fact that it's extracted the text means that for the first time, the first issue of PCW is searchable on the web!
Regarding collections, it's more when an admin notices. I've already pinged Jason Scott, and I'll link him to the one(s) you've uploaded so he knows what to do with them. He may make you an admin of the PCW collection so you can upload directly. I see he's moved the files to "magazines".
On the metadata, how about:
- making the file names start with 'pcw', 'personal_computer_world', or similar. That way we can tell what the file is when we download rather than wondering what "1978-04" is.
- for tags, how about adding: pcw, personalcomputerworld
- don't worry about OCR: archive.org does its own for PDF uploads
Code: Select all
ia upload PersonalComputerWorldYYYY-MM PersonalComputerWorldYYYY-MM.pdf \
--metadata="mediatype:texts" --metadata='title:Personal Computer World Magazine, YYYY-MM' \
--metadata='lang:English' --metadata="subject:computers" --metadata="subject:computing" \
--metadata="subject:magazine" --metadata="subject:pcw" --metadata="subject:personalcomputerworld" \
--metadata="subject:UK" --metadata="date:YYYY-MM" \
--metadata="description:<p>Personal Computer World Magazine<br />YYYY-MM</p>"
(I split the lines with \, you might want to avoid that)
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Thanks for the feedback, scruss!
I'll start investigating the commandline tool later today.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
That's correct. iainjh got the scans from a mysterious contact and sent copies to me, as discussed in previous messages in this thread.
Thanks!
I just tried using the commandline to tool to rename one of the files I'd already uploaded, but although the PDF filename seems to have been changed from 1978-10.pdf to pcw1978-10.pdf, the preview has disappeared, and the derive task is taking a long time to complete. I think I'll leave the filenames as they are for now because I'd rather keep the filenames of all my uploads consistent if possible. (Though I admit I can't give you a very good reason why!) But I might add "pcw" prefixes to all of them later on, depending on whether that derive task on pcw1978-10.pdf is successful.
Good idea. I'll start adding those to new uploads straight away. I'll try to go back and add those tags to the existing uploads later.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Sorry about my delayed reply yesterday: work got in the way!
Thanks so much for doing this. It fills a big gap in computer history.
Ah, I wouldn't bother renaming the files. Derive takes a really long time, and it's not clever enough to tell if only a file's name has changed. If anything important appears to have changed, derive starts all over again. Which can be a couple of days for really big files during busy times.lurkio wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 6:29 pm I just tried using the commandline to tool to rename one of the files I'd already uploaded, but although the PDF filename seems to have been changed from 1978-10.pdf to pcw1978-10.pdf, the preview has disappeared, and the derive task is taking a long time to complete.
Now there's a few up there with the same tags, it probably won't help much to add more tags. I see that Jason is having the files added to the main PCW collection as they upload, so they'll be easy to find. Plus the text indexing will help people find out about early UK home computing too!Good idea. I'll start adding those to new uploads straight away. I'll try to go back and add those tags to the existing uploads later.
Thanks so much for doing this. It fills a big gap in computer history.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
The uploads continue:
Btw, another anomaly has been pointed out to me: the April 1983 issue is only 22 pages long. @iainjh: any idea why?
EDIT: All the issues that I was sent have now been uploaded to Archive.org.
Btw, another anomaly has been pointed out to me: the April 1983 issue is only 22 pages long. @iainjh: any idea why?
EDIT: All the issues that I was sent have now been uploaded to Archive.org.
Re: Personal Computer World scans!
Thanks to all concerned for these.
I have a few of the missing ones:
1983-04 (full version)
1983-11
1983-12