Retro Thing

Getting Lost in the Covers

Hand me a map — any map will do, really — and I could stare at it for an hour. It's an addiction. And it turns out I have the same sort of sad addiction to old magazine covers. Thankfully, where there's an addiction, there's a website.

Cover Browser began primarily as a repository of comic book covers and now includes magazine, book and DVD covers. I wasted half a recent afternoon perusing only a few hundred of its more than 450,000 covers. I think I could spend an entire week looking at the more than 3,000 covers for The New Yorker. Week two would probably be spent on old car magazines like Car and Driver predecessor Sports Car Illustrated, Road & Track and Porsche Panorama. I would then move onto fashion (GQ, Vogue), pulp (Amazing Stories, For Men Only, Stag) and finally the never-ending array of old technology titles.

What's really striking to me is how boring and homogenized our magazine covers have become, with only a few exceptions. Nowadays each cover seems to be a pretty face and tantalizing blurbs. They probably work better as newsstand fodder, but that doesn't mean they're better.

Super 8 Handbook Now Available in the USA

Juergen Lossau's brilliant Super 8 handbook is now available on Amazon.com for about $20 less than you'd pay to get a copy shipped from the publisher in Germany.

Super 8 is a 290 page full-color hardcover guide for up-and-coming filmmakers. It covers movie camera selection and use, projection, editing (both splicing and digital), choosing the right film stock, a half dozen ways to develop film at home and much more. There's an extensive supplier list at the back, along with a list of festivals eager to screen your cinematic masterpieces.

Juergen's carefully researched text is presented in German and English (translated by yours truly), and the world class layout was designed by the same team responsible for smallformat and zoom magazines.

For more details, check out the book's product page on Amazon.com (or Amazon.de in Europe).

Kickstart A Unique Computer History Book

David Greelish writes, "I once published a zine from 1993 to 1997 called Historically Brewed. It grew to a small, but very respectful 500+ subscribers and was even sold at the Smithsonian and the Computer History Museum in Boston, MA (now in Mountain View, CA). I published nine issues, with a tenth never completed (changing the name to 'Classic Computing'). I want to take all of these and publish them into a compilation book."

He's running a Kickstarter project to fund the release of a 195 page book with color inserts. A donation of $25 will get you a signed copy, although you can certainly pledge as little as $1. For a taste of the content, check out an online copy of the first issue of Historically Brewed along with cover images from the other issues.

David was the Founder and President of the original Historical Computer Society and is currently President of the Atlanta Historical Computing Society, so he knows his stuff. As I write this, the project is about 65% funded, and a few generous donations from Retro Thing readers could help to push it over the top.

Support the Historically Brewed Kickstarter Project

Special Offer: Basic Computer Games & The Bot Folio

As I mentioned several weeks ago, Philip Conrod has reissued David H. Ahl's classic Basic Computer Games book using the new Microsoft Small Basic development environment for kids. He’s offering a $12.50 sale price to Retro Thing readers over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Philip also convinced retired illustrator George Beker to release a new ‘Bot Folio e-book ($8.75) that contains all of his iconic robot illustrations from Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games.

George has added 5 never before seen robot illustrations and the ‘Bot Folio includes Beker's comments on his drawings and technology in general. It's clear that he remains happily stuck in a long-gone, alternate world with absolutely no connection to modern technology.

Books: Not Dead Yet

Amazon.com announced this week that sales of e-books had outpaced hardcovers. And the company offered some seemingly startling stats: Over the past three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers. In the past month, the ratio is 180-to-100. The news reports were generally measured, but it was hard not to conclude that books are going to die. ("Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future," The New York Times joked.)

It would be naive to think that publishing won't continue its march toward electronic distribution, but there are some important caveats. The biggest one is that Amazon was talking hardcovers, not all printed books. As NPR points out, a lot of e-books are cheap and Kindle's convenience factor is much bigger when the device is compared to hardcovers.

It's also worth noting that there are a lot more paperbacks out there. The wildly popular "Eat, Pray, Love," for example, sold 200,000 copies in hardcover and more than 6 million in paperback. Also consider: Amazon is selling about 2,000 hardcover titles that were released in the last three months, compared with about 14,000 paperback titles.

No doubt, the trend lines point to e-book sales increasing by leaps and bounds — something tells me those $189 Kindles are going to be big this Christmas — but it's going to take a while for them to surpass paperbacks. Even when they do, I am not sure the printed book will be on its death bed.

Or, to put it another way, you'll undoubtedly have to explain to your grandkids what a "video store" was, but you probably won't have to worry about the concept of the library.

Support Retro Thing when you contribute to the death of the printed book by buying a Kindle.

Robot Readamatic Helps Slow Readers Pick Up The Pace

 
It may be cliche, but whenever I see a device like this, I feel certain dystopian willies. Maybe it's too much post-apocalyptic scifi, or perhaps one too many viewings of "Brazil", but heavy and unsympathetic learning aides leave me wondering when the robotic tutorial overlords are getting here.

This device hails from a pre-apocalyptic 1963. The Readamatic Pacer is designed to increase reading speed. Twirl the knob to the number of words per minute you want to read, and the mechanical arm reveals a line at a time. I'm a pretty fast reader, so I tried the old boy out. I was able to keep up with its top speed I'm proud to say, but the whirring of the Readamatic was distracting. Perhaps its due to age, but even in top form I've got to think that the screw drive and metal slat scraping across the page might be more than just a bit off-putting.

 
Interesting detail is that there are three scales on the speed dial. These are to accommodate different sizes of books (smaller book = fewer words per page). According to the manual, it's designed to speed up the rate of slow or lazy readers, or can also be used as a way to retrain readers to slow down if they are breezing too fast and have poor comprehension. Makes sense, though perhaps the fact I've never seen one of these before might be testimony to its not having been a great answer. Decades later, we still don't employ speed-reading robot tutors as far as I know. Or perhaps there's some robo-speedreader e-book app I don't know about?

related:

My newspaper doesn't want me
NASA unveils free e-book series
Extremely odd book titles

Free: 137 Years Of Popular Science

Mike Haener writes, "Here's a link to the entire 137 year history of PopSci magazine for free browsing. What a great archive of historic articles and period advertising.

I spent many a night lying in bed reading these articles as a kid and dreaming about what the future might bring. Amazing just how inaccurate they were! (ie. we were all supposed to be flying around in jet packs by now!)"

It's stunning to recall what a huge impact Popular Science had in the pre-internet days. I remember pouring over the "What's New" section in each new issue in my grade school library when I was only 10 or 11. The weird little ads at the back were the most fun -- a never ending parade of BB guns, hovercraft plans, windmills, canoe kits, small engine repair courses and even the occasional computer kit.

Incidentally, ninety years of Popular Science are in the public domain -- the publishers neglected to renew copyright through 1963.

Search The PopSci Archives

Awful Library Books

"A collection of the worst library holdings. The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information."

I'm seriously considering submitting an inter-library loan request for "Diseases From Space." 

Mary & Holly's Awful Library Books [via zx81basic]

How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

Priming The Pump tells the tale of Radio Shack's TRS-80, the first complete off-the-shelf microcomputer system. Designer Steve Leininger worked alone to build the prototype TRS-80 at a cost of less than $150,000. To keep the retail price low, they modified a black & white television set to serve as a monitor. That explains the machine's signature black-and-silver color scheme, since it's what RCA had on hand.

What happened next jump-started the home computing industry. "John Roach, Tandy's product manager, got an agreement from Charles Tandy to build 3500 units after Leininger demonstrated the prototype; this was exactly the number of stores they had -- Roach figured if no one bought the computers, at least the stores could use them.

Don French, a true believer, predicted they'd sell 50,000 the first year and urged the company to gear up the factory for mass production. Tandy managers, thinking they could never sell that many, were surprised when, in the weeks after the introduction, the Tandy switchboard was paralyzed with over 15,000 calls from people wanting to order a TRS-80. In the first year, over 250,000 people went on waiting lists to buy a TRS-80."

The Zilog Z80-based TRS-80 Model I was shipped as a ready-to-use $599 system. The main board was built into the keyboard unit and shipped with a plug-in B&W monitor and portable cassette recorder for storage.

The base unit could support up to 16K of memory, although an expansion dock (shown above) was available that increased memory to 48K and controlled two floppy drives. I loved the crisp 64 character x 16 line display, although there were no lower case characters in ROM. The cassette-based storage was somewhat finicky, because you had to be careful to set the volume just right to ensure a successful program load.

Radio Shack introduced a number of popular machines throughout the 1980s, but they eventually found it impossible to compete with a tide of inexpensive IBM-PC clones. Sadly, the TRS-80 name is now ancient history and Radio Shack markets a "me too" lineup of name-brand PCs and notebooks.

Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution [also available from Amazon]

Free 'Hal Spacejock' Books

Allow me to introduce long-time RT reader Simon Haynes. In addition to his brilliant taste in blogs, Simon is the author of Australia's most popular sci-fi comedy space adventure book series - Hal Spacejock.

Hal is an inept interstellar trader who pilots his ship on a series of improbably amusing misadventures. In the first book, he teams up with Clunk the robot to deliver an awkwardly illegal cargo while outrunning a pesky debt collection robot. Not your typical day at the office.

Now, here's the best part. Simon knows you lot are cheap bastards who can't resist free stuff. He somehow convinced Freemantle Press to release the first title in the series as a free ebook. The giveaway has been a stupendous success - over 50,000 downloads so far.

Simon announced earlier this week that the other books in the series are now available in DRM-free ebook format for a mere AUS$5 each. To get the word out, he's willing to email a free ebook of Hal Spacejock Second Course - the second title in the series - to anyone who blogs or tweets about the release of the Hal Spacejock ebooks before the end of March 2009.

So, there you go. Two award-winning sci-fi comedy books, uninfested with DRM and yours for the taking. What are you waiting for?

Get a free copy of the first Hal Spacejock novel
How to score a free copy of Hal #2

Racing The Beam: Inside The Atari 2600

Most retrospectives focus on the games and personalities, rather than exploring the technology that made it all possible. Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System [MIT Press, 184 pages] takes a different approach by showing how the limitations of the Atari VCS shaped the fledgling gaming industry.

Authors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost delve deep into the architecture and explore the evolution of game play and aesthetics from early VCS titles such as Combat (the pack-in), through the amazing coding skills necessary to bring advanced scrolling games like Pitfall! to life on an aging platform.

From MIT Press: "The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that 'Atari' became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen."

Even though many modern gamers regard the VCS with bemused disdain, it was an incredible leap forward in the late 1970s. Programmers coded in assembly language and cramming an entire game into as little as 4K was an exercise in arcane creativity. Just like modern developers, they faced extreme time constraints, limited budgets and constant pressure to deliver the next smash hit. The big difference is that projects are orders of magnitude more complex than they were thirty years ago.

Racing The Beam is slated for release on March 31, 2009 as the first title in The MIT Press Platform Studies series.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System [MIT Press]

related:
Atari's Biggest Blunder
Atari 2600 celebrates 30 years of low-rez fun
Atari 2600 Homebrew Games

Review + Giveaway: "Who We Were" Snapshots Of A Square America

"Who We Were" is a squarish book befitting the square snapshots within. The authors are collectors of black and white snapshots, or “vernacular photography” as the fancy set likes to say. I've come to know Nicholas Osborn through our mutual fondness of home movies. He's displayed his curated collection of photos at museums, galleries, and on his website at www.squareamerica.com. He and his co-authors have chosen 350 amateur photos spanning some 80 years to tell the story of America in "Who We Were".

Spanning the decades from about 1890 through the 70's, "Who We Were" is a collection of amateur anthropology. These random snapshots found at thrift stores and flea markets could be our relatives doing all the important stuff in life; waving to airplanes, drinking a beer... and of course taking pictures of it all. It's doubtful that the original photographers sought to create art, but somehow when collected together these private yet shared memories take on the qualities of art photography.

The photos capture regular people being themselves, and the book wisely lets the photos speak for themselves too. Most pages feature a single picture annotated with anecdotes from the original photographers, or a reproduction of text written on the back of the picture. It only takes a few pages to travel silently between the finer moments of family life and some of the most unfortunate and shameful times in our history.

I'm sure no one thought taking a picture of yet another doughy guy soaking up 50's leisure would be important in the future.  I'm grateful to both the photographer for taking the picture, and to the authors of "Who We Were" for doing such a good job of keeping these little bits of history alive.

We live in a time where it's cheaper and easier than ever to take loads of digital photos. The problem is that few people print out pictures anymore. That means no artifacts for future generations (even our own families) to find. "The Way We Were" shows the continued historic value of physical media. Years from now will amateur historians dig through the piles of discarded cell phones to try to dig out grainy low res pictures of life today? I hope so. This book reminds us of what we owe the future - inadvertent art

Here's some great news... The authors gave us an autographed copy of their book to give away to one lucky Retro Thing reader. All readers are eligible to enter. All you have to do is add a comment to this post talking about your favorite snapshot. If you'd like, you can even upload a little version of it to share with all of our readers. Just say a few words about what makes it special to you. On February 7th, we'll pick one comment at random to win the book.

One additional note. Just like our last giveaway, if you're from outside the US or Canada we welcome your entry, but require that you cover the shipping costs to your country. Thanks for understanding, and good luck to all of you!

Bring a little piece of square America home by purchasing "Who We Were" at ten dollars off the cover price. As a bonus you'll receive a genuine vintage snapshot and a DVD of some of Nick's home movie collection.

You can also find the book at Amazon.com

The final issue of smallformat magazine

I usually don't mention my own projects on Retro Thing, but the last issue of smallformat - the magazine for amateur Super 8mm and 16mm filmmakers - shipped today, after three years of publication. I owe my sincere thanks to Editor-in-Chief Juergen Lossau for giving me the opportunity to work on this project from the first sentence to the last.

Perhaps it was ridiculously optimistic to think that a traditional film journal could survive in the 21st century, but I think we created a wonderful collection of film articles - 19 issues in all - that will age gracefully.

Back issues are still available, just give me a shout for details.

Visit the official smallformat site [smallformat.de]

Vintage Popular Science Mags Online

I am in awe.

Google Book Search just added a massive collection of vintage magazines, including Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Amazingly, it looks like Pop Sci first hit newsstands in May 1872. It took another 33 years for Popular Mechanics to arrive on the scene. The ability to instantly search decades worth of material is irresistible, and I will gleefully respond by spending countless hours learning how to build vintage hydrofoils and futuristic transistor radios in my garden shed.

Find out more at the Official Google Blog [via Make]

Review: Homemade Hollywood - Fans Behind the Camera

For years I have been a huge fan of home movies. I've researched and collected them for years and have become well versed in the many forms a home movie might take: the “Up and Down the Christmas Tree Movie”, the “Panning Wildly over Scenery Movie”, the “Standing Still Even Though It's A Movie Movie”, and the like. Home films are great for family nostalgia, but amateur movie gear also empowered backyard movie moguls. Though the years many amateurs have tried their hand at remakes and re-imaginings of the adventures of their favorite sci-fi and fantasy characters.

Homemade Hollywood is a new book by Clive Young chronicles the fan film from its earliest days. The author traced the first fan film to 1922 - astonishing!  It's a great story of a pair of barnstorming scheisters that hoodwink the folks of a South Carolina town into paying the ersatz filmmakers to shooting an Our Gang comedy in their city. They did actually create the film and have a screening before skipping town, and fortunately a few reels of footage from the movie still exists today.

With the introduction of Super 8 & home video decades later, even more amateurs tried their hand at creating a fan film.  In 1992 Dan Poole heard the rumblings of a James Cameron helmed film starring Spider-Man. Poole beat Spidey to the screen by a decade with “The Green Goblin's Last Stand” (it's even based on the same issue of the comic that inspired the eventual 2002 movie). This flick is a must-see as they filmed a foolish spectacular stunt with a costumed wall crawler swinging on a rope between buildings 35 feet up in the air – with no safety net!

The book continues on into the modern era, crediting 1997's Star Wars fan film “Troops” (a parody of TV's “Cops”) and the introduction of iMovie and miniDV cameras with igniting the fan film phenomenon. Suddenly practically anyone could create movies with credible special effects, and get an audience of tens of thousands via the internet. With that came innumerable “two guys in Jedi PJ's engaged in a random lightsaber fight in the woods” films, but there have been many gems too.

In the days before the internet, fan films were mostly confined to sci-fi conventions and backyard parties – so they were hard to learn about. Many filmmakers also tended to keep their unauthorized productions on the QT. The big companies that own these cherished characters tend to be skittish and litigious about fans making free with their copyrights. Some studios have been smart like Paramount, permitting the lavish “New Voyages” Star Trek fan films that have featured actors and writers from the original series.

Clive Young's book does a great job putting together the unknown history of fan films, even going so far as to index dozens of them in the back. It's a relatively quick read that I hard a hard time putting down, and the many threads of the story are drawn together remarkably well. I never got to make a fan film (they frowned on that sort of thing in film school), but after reading Homemade Hollywood I wish I had. Then again it seems like any film project, no matter what the intent, is going to be a source of drama and problems – so maybe I didn't miss out on all that much!

Homemade Hollywood explores the amateur desire to create more adventures with their favorite TV & movie characters. Readers can admire the can-do attitude of these amateur filmmakers, and if you poke around on the internet you can check out a lot of these movies without waiting for the next Trek convention.  If some of those big studio lawyers can take a break from sending out reams of “cease & desist” letters, the book can teach them that fan films are a labor of love, and are the sincerest form of flattery.

links:

Pre-order Homemade Hollywood from Amazon
Visit the author's website