Hooray, another December post on the world’s least-frequently-updated blog. This time it’s a request: Computing Today, from right back at the dawn of time (1978). CT started out as a suppliment to Electronics Today, and you can tell: lots of techie information, mind-boggling prices in adverts for what were basically outgrown programmable calculators, and dense articles full of assembler. I’m not too sure why, but I love this kind of thing, and these are lovely clean scans that look great.

Admirably, CT did it’s best to stick to the technical side of things and ignore games as much as possible, before less admirably disappearing without any warning in 1985. Grab the torrent in the usual place, just over 5.5Gb.

Now for a bit of housekeeping: it’s been over 13 years since I first started this blog, and I know some of you will have struggled to keep up with the relentless pace of updates since then – sorry about that. It started out as an experiment: could I OCR the scruffy scans on WoS? The answer was: yeah, sort of – certainly good enough to get to my original goal of making them locally searchable.

Since then, everything’s got better: there’s a lot more high-res scans available (all hail Mort!), OCR software has improved dramatically even on lower-res images, and it’s easier to get decent (de)compression without a huge amount of CPU. More importantly, I’ve learned along the way about optimising PDFs and images in general, and CT is the first set that I’ve produced using a completely new set of tools and processes – let’s hope they work!

The original PDFs from back in the day are relatively terrible, and I intend to rework most (all?) of them to the current “gold standard” in the future. Even with most/all of the scans available at the fantastic Internet Archive, I think there’s value in having fully-indexed OCR’d PDFs in a mostly standardised format available for easy download.

And therein lies the conundrum … torrents. I’ve never been a huge fan of using torrents for distribution, but they were the easiest way for me to share relatively large files with my relatively small bandwidth. And it’s worked fine: I try to keep all torrents seeded 24×7, and in just 2023, I’ve uploaded over 10Tb of data. Over the years I’ve probably done easily 10 times that: sorry Plusnet.

However, if I go and update a magazine (or, heaven forbid, need to fix a mistake or broken file), I’ve then got the dilemma of keeping the old one active whilst also seeding the new one. It’s messy – I’ve got to keep the old one hanging around in case no-one else is seeding it, downloaders might not know there’s a newer one available, and it’s taking up bandwidth.

I’ve looked at things like IPFS, which sound great but I just cannot get working satisfactorily. IPFS seems to kill my (relatively decent) machine and the files don’t seem available remotely. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t have enough perspective to know whether it’s something I should spend more time on.

Another option would be to use a file host – somewhere I can stick the files up onto where everyone else could access. This would mean the one accessible is always the latest/best version available, and we could do single-issue downloads etc. My criteria for a file hoster is:

• no adverts or daft CAPTCHAs
• easy to use
• as cheap/free as possible.

The one that ticks most of those boxes for me is Mega. However, to get the required storage and transfer limits would involve paying more a year than I’m doing just now – ~£90 vs £0. I’m incredibly grateful for the donations I’ve received on the site over the years, but even with those I’d need to subsidise the cost of hosting.

So: this is a call for comments. Do torrents work fine for you? Should I try IPFS again? If I hosted the files online somewhere, would that be a Good Thing for you – and are there better hosting options, or something other way of getting the good stuff out there? Is it really that important as you can get them from the IA anyway? Please let me know what you think- I do all of this mainly for my own amusement, but if changing the distribution method makes it easier for everyone …

It’s been (almost) 5 years since the last update to this blog. So if you’re surprised to see this update, that’s nothing compared to the level of astonishment I felt when I remembered the password.

But the good news is I’ve finally got around to finishing off Amiga Power, overcoming a lethal combination of apathy, prevarication and laziness, all on my part. Add into this the lack of a seemingly-complete set: missing pages, missing issues and misnamed files all mean that it’s been the digital equivalent of raking about down the back of the sofa to cobble things together. Unfortunately, this means there’s an obvious difference in file size of some issues, and the very occasional page that’s not quite as good in terms of image quality. However, I now believe that this is a complete Amiga Power collection (and maybe the only complete one available – although I’m way out of touch with the scanning Gods so apologies if there’s much better sources already out there).

Amiga Power, as everyone will know, was a sister mag to Amiga Format, and an excuse for some of Future Publishing’s best writers to be honest and/or sarcastic about Amiga games (and the games industry in general). The gang of hacks included the pre-Reverand Stuart Campbell, who continues to be as wonderfully chippy about most things (and even some mad things), and despite storming out of forums at the drop of a perceived insult will always have a high placing in my Top 10 People I Like Who Wrote For Computer Mags. Come back Stu, we miss you.

So pour yourself a tin of lightly sparkling fish drink, grab the torrent (14Gb!), share and enjoy, and I’ll be back again in less than 5 years. Probably.

Two posts in a few days? Yes please. Two Acorn magazines in a row? Go on then.

It’s time for BEEBUG, a wonderful newsletter/magazine for the BBC Micro and family. Lots of technical detail for the serious Beeb user; it’s the kind of magazine I would have loved back in the day, if only I didn’t have a Spectrum and was born into money. The only time I got to play around with a BBC was when it was our turn with the computer-on-a-trolley in primary school … BBC B with 5.25″ disk drive and a chunky power switch … Microvitec CUB monitor … that game where you had to get the fox, chicken and grain across the river … *sniffle* …

So for those with a predilection for red function keys and excellent BASIC, grab the goodness here, and SHIFT-BREAK into seed mode when you’re done.

Yes, an update at last, and I’m as surprised as you. But with Christmas looming, a couple of weeks of unclaimed annual leave and an aversion to the sounds of presents being wrapped means I’ve got no excuse not to try and catch up with the backlog of magazines to be crunched.

So here’s the first of hopefully a few releases: the wonderful Electron User. A tidy 3.2Gb across 82 issues of 80’s goodness, perfect for those whose parents couldn’t afford a BBC Micro but were told the Elk was “just as good”. Grab it
here and seed like a seed-y thing.

Here’s another Future Publishing “Format” title, this time ST Format. I was never an ST user – I didn’t have the right shape fingers for the function keys – but had many a robust discussion with some Atari aficionados back in the glory days of the ST v Amiga wars, when things like blitter chips and multitasking mattered.

You know the drill – download the torrent here and seed from now unto eternity. I’ll try and squeeze out another bundle before the end of the year, but no promises!

Ahoy there retro lovers/data hoarders (or, if you’re like me, both). Apologies for the long silence, but you should all know by now that doesn’t mean that I’ve disappeared – just that far less interesting things are taking up my time. But I’ve got a few days annual leave to burn up before the end of the year, so let’s get some of the backlog sorted out.

Just to get things rolling (and to help me refamiliarise myself on how to compile a torrent file without buggering it up) we have “Commodore Power/Play”, published in the good ole US of A by CBM themselves. Grab it here.

I should have another bundle or two to get out there in the next few days, so keep coming back for more. And just in case you’re wondering, yes – Amiga Power is still on the cards, as is New Computer Express, both thanks to the generosity of some truly exceptional people. I’m working on it, honest.

I’ve had this one hanging around for ages, but for some reason (probably incompetence) it never got uploaded. But here it is now: to be honest, a magazine that’s mainly type-ins isn’t exactly the best “fit” for OCR’ing, but it’s only 700Mb.

Grab it here, and relive those many frustrating afternoons tapping in a thousand lines of mis-printed BASIC, in the pursuit of a substandard Space Invaders clone with “machine code sound”.

Ah, the weekly computer magazine – we shall never see your like again. Here’s Personal Computer News, a sister title to the monthly Personal Computer Games. It disappeared in early 1985, at the same time as PCG, so we can only assume that someone at VNU decided those computer thingys were just a fad after all.

Get it, and a whole lot more beside, at the usual page.

Now, a plea: does anyone out there have Amiga Power issue 51, either physically or scanned? It’s the only one I’m missing, and it’s the one mag that everyone asks for. We’ve got Amiga Format and Amiga Shopper, so AP would complete the Future-Publishing-Amiga-magazines set. Please mail me if you can help!

At last, the first update of 2016. Amiga World was a US mag, devoted to the Miggy in the country that gave birth to the wonder machine but never really took it to it’s heart. It’s got that peculiar American look, with yards of white space in the editorial pages, as opposed to the UK cram-as-much-as-you-can approach.

Grab all 6-and-a-bit gigabytes of it here, and let’s all agree not to leave it so long next time.

I’ve had this one hanging around my hard drive for ages, and for some reason never got around to finishing it. So here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody’s having …. the chance to grab 20Gb of Electron/BBC/Archimedes/RISC nostalgia, over an impressive 267 issues. Grab it here, and remember seeding is not just for Christmas.