Permission received to reproduce Compute! publications

[nikoniko]

[Comp.sys.cbm users, welcome! Thank you for your interest in this project]

A month or so ago I got it in my head that something really needs to be done to preserve and make available old publications related to the Commodore 8-bits, so starting with a fairly prolific publisher, Compute!, I sought permission to scan their books and magazines and make them freely available on the internet. The current rights lie with Omni Publications International, and it took a number of e-mails to finally reach owner Robert C. Guccione, who is perhaps most famous for founding both the Penthouse and Omni magazines.

In reply to my request, Mr. Guccione wrote, "Go ahead. I don't care."

That's good enough for me.

Now to get started buying or borrowing books and magazines for the cause. If I'm lucky enough to win any prize in the games compo, I've decided that the money will go towards this project.

First thing I'm working on is compiling a list of material published by Compute! to see what I should be looking for, and then I'll go from there.

If anyone wishes to loan, donate or sell Compute! books or magazines, scan something they already have, or put a few dollars toward purchasing, please let me know. Anyone in the US or Canada, I would be willing to pay to have your things shipped to me and then ship them back to you when I'm done.

[hydrophilic]

Wow!  That's a huge project you've decided to undertake!  Kudos for seeking permission from the publisher.

I'm sorry I don't have any Compute magazines or books.  Just some Run magazines (if I can even find 'em) and Abacuss books.  I have a scanner with OCR but no Adobe Acrobat (well just the reader).  So I don't know if I can help, but keep us posted and maybe I (or you) will think of something.

[nikoniko]

I would probably go ahead anyway without permission, considering there's pretty much no first-hand commercial value to most old computer books, but I figured I'd at least try to go about things properly first. I've contacted a couple other publishers, too, including Abacus, but am still waiting to hear back. I hope they'll all be open to the idea. Unlike computer games, where a title might have potential as a port or remake in the future (like what System 3 is doing with the Last Ninja and Impossible Mission games), there's hardly any point in a company guarding the IP for old computer books like these. I mean, we're not exactly talking about something like Knuth's legendary The Art of Computer Programming.

I recently picked up an Optibook 3600 scanner, which is geared toward scanning books and magazines. I've yet to really play around with it yet, but I'm impressed by how well it eliminates shadowing and adjusts for curvature near the spine. It should make scanning quite a bit less of a chore than it would be otherwise.

[Blacklord]

If anyone wishes to loan, donate or sell Compute! books or magazines, scan something they already have, or put a few dollars toward purchasing, please let me know. Anyone in the US or Canada, I would be willing to pay to have your things shipped to me and then ship them back to you when I'm done.

I have some I can scan - will compile the list & let you know - do you want a sub-domain on www.commodore128.org to host the stuff ?

By the way, nice work!

cheers,

Lance

[nikoniko]

That would be awesome, Lance! Any scanning you could do would be much appreciated, and I'd be happy to do OCR and cleanup on the files. I do have hosting space I can use, but if you wouldn't mind making the project part of your site I think it would be great to keep it here. With your great Google ranking for "commodore 128", that would make it much easier for people to discover the archive.

[Golan Klinger]

I'm not clear on what it is you're trying to do. Are you talking about putting up scanned images of pages from magazines or OCRing them or what? As you noted, Atarimagazines.com has a few articles and disks from Compute!'s Gazette and a huge number of articles from Compute!. There's also the work in progress that is the Ahoy! Magazine Web Archive. I donated an almost complete set of Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette to that project last summer although, unfortunately, I haven't seen much in the way of progress since doing so. It might be useful if all these resources were brought together in a single place...

[Blacklord]

I wonder if the same could be done for RUN ?

Lance

[nikoniko]

I'm not clear on what it is you're trying to do. Are you talking about putting up scanned images of pages from magazines or OCRing them or what?

Both. Scanned images to preserve the material as it appears, and OCRed so that it can be searchable. AtariMagazines is nice, but as far as I've seen of their Compute! material they offer just the OCRed text and the only scans are of covers. Not only that, but they don't include the type-in programs. What's the point of having an article describing a great little game or routine but then not having the code? At least with Compute!'s Gazette we have disk images for most or all of it, but for Compute! I'm not aware of any such archive. Even with disk images, it's still nice to have a printed program listing (at least for BASIC programs). Back when I bought Compute!, I enjoyed reading the type-in listings for all the systems since the ideas and algorithms could often be translated over to another. I appreciate what AtariMagazines is doing, but it's not as thorough as I'd like it to be.

Thanks for reminding me about the Ahoy! archive. I hadn't check it out in a while since it seemed to be stalled. And I have to admit, I can't fully appreciate what they're doing either  since they're not archiving whole issues. I like to see old ads, illustrations, read editorial content, see screenshots and so on. Ahoy! never was much to look at, but to me it feels lobotomized without all the elements there. Even if we're in 2007 now, there's a historical context for our beloved machines, their accesories and their software which should be preserved to some degree, and I think complete scans are the only way to do that. As such, the Zzap! project is much more interesting to me, with many entire issues scanned from front to back, and some of the material available OCRed. Anyway, although the Ahoy! project seems to have a different philosophy than mine, I'd be happy to pitch in if they wish to send some magazines my way.

Compute!...Ahoy!...Zzap!... Remember when computing was so exciting that magazines needed exclamation points in their names? I don't know what was up with those people over at RUN. Good magazine, though it might have been more appealing as RUN!!!!!!

[MikeC]

Hi everyone,

I'm the guy behind the Computes Gazette and Ahoy! archive site.

Just to let everyone know where things stand: both projects are on hold indefinitely and they may, ultimately, be canceled. I have been consistently adding to the content over the past few years but those additions were never uploaded to the respective sites. The archive as it stands today has several hundred pages (each page represents a single article). In fact, I had recently started working on a Computes! section and added several dozen articles. However, I have subsequently removed all the content from my site so if you go to the URL, you'll get blank pages.

It wasn't my intent to scan each magazine issues page-by-page...although I have been tempted to do so. All I really wanted to do was archive the content related to the various games and applications (such as UltraFont+ and Speedscript) and "port" them to HTML pages. Although, the Ahoy! magazine archive was much more comprehensive since I scanned every single article, including the various commentaries, reviews, tutorials, etc.

I also captured the screenshots via WinVice and even went to the trouble of trying to match the screenshot exactly to what was in the magazine. To accomplish this exact match, I would often pull the screenshot into Photoshop and do pixel-by-pixel editing.

One of the significant challenges you will face if you decide to OCR pages is how to deal with PETSCII characters. There is no ASCII or Unicode equivalent for most PETSCII characters. So, what do you do? I tried a number of different options and let me assure you, only one technique worked but it took a lot of effort to accomplish.

Also, one important fact to point out that although the owner/publisher of Computes! content, Mr. Guccione, might not care about the copyrights, the original authors do seem to care. I've been contact by several of the original authors who've requested various conditions. In fact, one gentleman actually tracked down my home phone number and called me. Some wanted their content removed, some wanted a simple copyright statement indicating that they owned the rights to the original article. Also, those who allowed for the content to remain insistent that the site wasn't generating any revenue, which it wasn't.

So, don't assume you're in the clear just because Mr. Guccione says so. The copyrights have, from my understanding, reverted back to the original authors and some will track you down.

Oh, and for the record...I'm returning Golan's magazines. I was under the impressed he wanted them return when the project was completed. I never realized it was a "donation" until I read his post above.

Anyway, good luck with your project.

MikeC

[nikoniko]

Mike,
Thank you the update on your projects. Sorry to hear that they're on hold, but I understand that sometimes things don't turn out as we hope. I hope you didn't remove your existing content because of me, however, and especially not the Ahoy! stuff. If my comments here sounded disparaging, I apologize, but I was simply explaining the differences between what I wish to do and what others have done so far. Everyone should do things according to their own goals, and my goals are going to be different from someone else's. The kind of record I wish to create may not meet the needs or standards of everyone, so there's definitely room for more than one person to be archiving old publications.

I appreciate your insight into the caveats of copyright. I wasn't aware that the copyrights to individual articles and programs reverted to their authors. Would you or someone else here happen to have one of the magazines nearby? It may be a while yet before I have any issues in hand myself, but if someone would be so kind to look up article submission guidelines and summarize for me the copyright section, I'd appreciate it. Things were wonderful when I thought I already had all the rights I needed.

In one respect, it's encouraging to hear that the original authors got their copyrights back. On the other, it makes a project like this more complicated. I suppose that leaves me in the clear to scan regular columns, but any submitted content might be challenged by the original authors. Honestly, I'm surprised to hear that anyone would want to have their content removed, especially from a site generating no revenue, making available an article having to do with a series of machines that have long been out of production, with probably only some several thousands of those machines still in any sort of regular use. But copyright is copyright, so it's their right to deny use of their material if they choose. I can definitely understand wanting attribution, however.

Regarding OCR, in my case it would mainly be to support online text searching of the archive, so the limitations of ASCII would be tolerable. Perhaps after completion of the archive, I could do something more thorough with the OCR to accomodate PETSCII.

Thank you for your well-wishes with the project. Please stay and enjoy the forums if you're so inclined. There aren't so many of us here, but I think it's a pretty nifty place if you like the C128 or the PET series.

[MikeC]

Hi nikoniko,

Stopping my project and removing the content had absolutely nothing to do with you. It's just a personal decision based on the fact that life is just too busy (I run my own business, I have a wife and kid with more kids on the way). My goal was to completely finish the work and release it to the public. I just don't like the fact that the sites are sitting there, unfinished.

I was a little surprised by the timing. I decide to stop work on my archive site and the next thing I know, you're starting up something very similar. I totally encourage your efforts but I also need to stress that it's a lot of work. I guess it also depends on how you're going to approach the work.

Personally, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. When I started scanning the pages, I noticed that sometimes there were discolorations on a page or image or there were marks and scratches. That would real bother me so I'd pull the pages into Photoshop and start fixing them up. After a few of these pages, I just gave up because the work was just too much. That's one of the reasons I decided to switch directions and go to an OCR'ed web page and capture screenshots via WinVice. If stuff like that doesn't bother you, scanning pages in doesn't take a lot of time.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to archive these magazine. I realized that the archived web sites didn't have the same "feel" as the magazines. It just didn't feel right...you know what I'm talking about. The bottom line is, to do it right would have taken a lot of time and I just didn't want to spend the time doing it.

Also, I can't explain why various author bothered to contact me. Personally, I agree with you. Why bother having it removed especially when I wasn't making any money off it. Heck, I didn't even have any banner ads or anything like that. I can only make assumptions to their reasons...maybe they thought that although I wasn't making money off it now, maybe I would try to do so down the road. I don't know. All I can tell you is that people did track me down...some were cool with it and some were upset.

That's also the big reason I decided to go with the "one article, one page" approach...if someone wanted their content removed, I would just delete that single page or a series of pages that contained their content. If I scanned in an entire issue of Gazette, for example, and compiled it into a PDF document, if someone wanted their content removed, it would be a bit of a pain. Worse, the integrity of the issue would be compromised since a page (or pages) are now missing.

Last point, you're definitely going to run into problems with OCR. I was using OmniPage Pro 12 (or was 14?), which was pretty much a best-of-breed software. It was far from perfect. It had a lot of trouble with the typeface used in Gazette and Ahoy. 1 and l was always mixed up, 0 and O as well. It took me a long time to figure out how to get it to OCR at pretty close to 100% but even then, I'd spend quite a bit of time tweaking and proofreading.

I'm not writing this to discourage you or anything like that. I'm just trying to give you an appreciation as to the effort you're going to have to put it and where you're likely to run into problems.

Anyway, definitely good luck (again). I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with and your approach. I'll definitely pop in every now and then but to be honest, the CBM/retro community and the various projects just don't interest me anymore. When life become real busy, you start to lose interest in your various hobbies and interests and you tend to focus on things that are most important in life.

Definitely contact Golan, if you haven't already, since he has (or will have in the next few days) his Compute and Gazette magazines back. Maybe he'll ship them to you since you're vision of the project more closely matches his vision.

MikeC

[nikoniko]

Thanks for coming by again and sharing more about your experience. While I can understand that you don't like your project sitting unfinished, I don't see what value there is in taking it down suddenly and completely and making it unavailable to the public. As far as I know, most or all of the material you archived is unavailable elsewhere online. You may not have time or interest to continue, but people can still benefit from access to what you've done so far.

I'd like to ask you to reconsider your decision. Though Ahoy! was hard to find where I grew up, it seemed like a great magazine from the few issues I ever came across, and it would really be a shame for its only online presence to disappear.

Although I haven't scanned anything for this project yet, the 0/O and 1/l thing is definitely something I'm aware of from other things I've done. And I'm sure those won't be the only misread characters. The approach I have in mind, since I'll be doing OCR more for creating a searchable index than presentation, is to allow some fuzziness to searches so that, for instance, "VIC" can also match "V1C", and so on. That's not to say I won't work on cleaning up the text beforehand, catching what I can through a combination of spellcheck, visual examination and possibly some custom scripting, but with the large volume I'll be dealing with I know that errors are inevitable. Perfection is a nice goal, but I won't consider imperfection a reason to withhold the material from the public. I'll also spend what time I can on visual quality, but it may be quite a while before everything looks pretty. If the material is discolored but clearly readable, and I don't have time to Photoshop it, it'll still go up. Editing will be an ongoing effort as time affords.

Regarding the copyright issue, if I need to remove single articles due to copyright, I suppose I'll have to resort to some FBI-style redaction on the scanned image. Well, maybe not quite that ugly, but I'll come up with something. Really, though, I find it difficult to understand why anyone would want to remove their material in the first place. This will be a non-commercial effort, purely for educational and historical purposes. If anyone out there has any concerns about their content, feel free to contact me here, or through the archive that will be available at Commodore128.org once we get started.

Well, I'm happy to say that one person has already given me explicit permission to reproduce his work: Cameron Kaiser. Cameron, many thanks to you, not only for that, but for all of the wonderful contributions you've made and commitment you've shown to the Commodore community over the years.

[MikeC]

Hi nikoniko,

Let me assure you that the timing of things is a total fluke. Please believe me when I say that the closing of my site has absolutely nothing to do with you or anything posted on this forum. The timing is pretty crazy, no doubt about it.

The closure notice you're referring to was an older one...I believe a few years back. I decided to resurrect the site after at the urging of some people. So I did. However, recently, some things happened that made me realize I really need to move on.

Personally, I'm just tired of various people (again, not you) who seem to have an unjustified sense of entitlement. You wouldn't believe the things people have written to me over the years about how I should do things, what I should do, give me access to the site, I'm this and I'm that, etc.

This week, I came to the realization that I've been wasting my time. Actually, I've suspected this for awhile but it finally hit me this week because of some hateful e-mail from someone. I just don't have the time to bother with all this while a bunch of back seat drivers tell me how I should do things and when I disagree, start writing hurtful, mean-spirited things to me. Sadly, this seems to be a hallmark of the CBM community, which I too have been guilty of at times.

Ultimately, it's time to move on. This also going to be the last time I log in here for a long time. if you'd like, feel free to e-mail me directly: mikec_cbm@hotmail.com

[nikoniko]

Okay, thanks Mike. Sorry to see your archive go, but I won't push any more.

Yeah, we have some characters in the C= community, myself included. I may have to write an "ornery filter" for my inbox.

[Blacklord]

You wouldn't believe the things people have written to me over the years about how I should do things, what I should do, give me access to the site, I'm this and I'm that, etc.

Somewhat off the topic, but I've noticed that sort of behaviour is rife on usenet, there are people there more than willing to tear strips off others for what seems to me to be no reason at all. There seems to be very little tolerance for other peoples positions or viewpoints.

Gotta say this bunch here are pretty good (But then I usually do what they tell me to do :ironisk:)

The community is really too small these day to fracture due to "personality disorders" - unfortunately I've seen new people show up, ask a simple question & get shouted down or castigated. They don't come back & who can blame 'em ?

cheers,

Lance

[hydrophilic]

Regarding the copyright issue, if I need to remove single articles due to copyright, I suppose I'll have to resort to some FBI-style redaction on the scanned image.

I had a very similar thought before I read that far down the page... I was thinking black out the text like in UFO reports but leave the author's name.

Concerning PETSCII, there is a corresponding gliff in Unicode for almost every character, but I'm not aware of any OCR programs that support them.  I had an idea about the typos and miscolored scans.  If you have control of the web site host, maybe you could make the content editable kinda like Wikipedia?  Of course that opens the door to spammers, but you could allow corrected/improved versions to be submitted but not accessible to viewers until you proof it.  It sounds like a bit of work, but adding that bit of interactivity to the site might increase interest.

[nikoniko]

Hmm.... a wiki might be just the sort of approach we need. I think it would be great to provide the community an easy way to participate in and improve the project. Thanks for the idea! It's definitely something worth looking into.

[Stephane Richard]

oh yeah, sounds like a great idea indeed...perhaps sections so that when people just feel like writing they can just add it..so a non compute! writings or something. ;-)...along with the official compute! (and others in the future)

[nikoniko]

You read my mind. Just earlier today I was thinking that some advantages of a wiki over a static page would be that people could add their own material, set up interesting links and cross-references, and so on. :-)

Well, while I'm still waiting to get material in hand -- first book is on its way (thanks istvan, for the review!) -- I'll look into some wiki packages. I've worked with a few, but not with the considerations of this particular project in mind.

[Stephane Richard]

I think this is gonna be a great system.  http://www.opensourcecms.com has all possible types of wikis, CMS, Blog, you name it that are probably worth looking at.  The good thing about this place is that you can try them all out on demo sites so you can see how things work and make a very informed decision on which one you want to go with.  All this without just reading about it but actually trying it live. :-)

[nikoniko]

Hey, that is an awesome site. Thanks for the link! Now I know what I'll be doing the rest of the evening.

[Stephane Richard]

lol I know too (even though it was yesterday now ;-),....but yeah...it's a great place to learn about all this stuff. :-) can't wait to see what you decide on :-)

[nikoniko]

I'm torn between two metaphors. Ideally what I'd like to have is something that combines your typical CMS portal with wiki-like editing features, whereas most of what I've seen so far aims to be one or the other but not both. I'll spend some more time this evening checking out various projects to see if I can find something that's a decent fit. I don't mind doing some customizing, but if I can start with something that's already close to what I want, that would be great.

[Guest]

I'm torn between two metaphors. Ideally what I'd like to have is something that combines your typical CMS portal with wiki-like editing features, whereas most of what I've seen so far aims to be one or the other but not both. I'll spend some more time this evening checking out various projects to see if I can find something that's a decent fit. I don't mind doing some customizing, but if I can start with something that's already close to what I want, that would be great.

Sounds like you want SharePoint.  Some hosting providers offer SharePoint portals.

[Stephane Richard]

tikiwiki has CMS features like article and comments, wiki features, forums, you name it.

and sharepoint seems good too.