I saw your video on YouTube and came to check this out. Very impressive! I have a collection of Compute! issues, but I don't have all of them. I thought about doing something like this 15 years ago, but got squeamish about it, because of copyright issues, and the amount of work it would take. I knew it would be a major project. A little bird told me a few years ago to not worry so much about the copyrights, that if I wanted to do it, I should go ahead, and only take something down if one of the original authors complained. Nobody was going to be making any money off of this stuff now. In fact, they might be gratified to see their articles preserved. Thirdly, I didn't have a good idea of how to do what you've done. I wanted to make the issues searchable. The only way I could conceive of doing that would be to OCR them to HTML, but I wanted to preserve the graphics, the "look and feel" of the magazine. It seemed like a really big job... For whatever reason, using PDFs didn't occur to me.
I wrote a blog post (
http://tekkie.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/ ... ng-part-3/) almost 5 years ago now on Compute! Magazine. I highlighted what I thought were their best programs, and which issues they were in. I wished I could point people to those issues online, so they could see what it was like to read the magazine, and maybe try their hand at entering the programs themselves in an emulator. The
http://www.atarimagazines.com/ site has been around for many years. It has an index of all the issues, and has partial text for many of the articles. I say partial, because most of them do not have program listings. I used articles from there, but it didn't feel very satisfying. So I was real happy to see what you've done.
I didn't notice this until today. I saw your note on the Compute! page that since the PDFs are large, and cost in bandwidth, that you'd like people who want to look at more than a few issues to order the complete set on DVD. You might want to make that notice larger. I've stopped by that page several times and missed it, because it's in small type. I revised my Compute! post, and was pointing my blog readers directly to the relevant PDFs, but I saw your note. I've changed my links to point to the relevant HTML pages on your site instead.
As I was reviewing your PDFs (since I was linking directly to them for a bit), I noticed that some of your links are not right. In a couple cases the primary link for an issue (if you click on the cover image) either gave me the 2nd section you digitized, or gave me a completely different issue. I noticed this in about 4 cases, but I can't remember all of them. The two I can remember now are July 1982, and January 1987. When I click on the cover image for July 1982, I get the 2nd section of that issue, not the 1st. When I click on January 1987, I get the 1st section of March 1987 instead. Just wanted to point that out.
