Softalk issues

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Dec 252012
 

Sooner than I’d anticipated, I’m back on the blog. I’ve scanned a couple of my issues of Softalk, and as an experiment, I tried putting them in a shared folder on box.com, since I happened to have a bunch of space available there. But the downloading interface is not optimal, and it pings me every time someone downloads a file. The advantage was that it was browsable, but I’ll replicate that by posting the links here.

Update: I’ve updated August 1982, it is now complete except for the back cover.

What I’ve been doing is extracting selected individual articles (with full-page ads removed) from the magazines, and then (where I’ve done the whole thing) the entire issues. These are searchable images, originally scanned at 600dpi and down sampled to 300dpi, since, as it turns out, the printed resolution is not high enough to warrant 600dpi. I’ve also put bookmarks in the PDF files for the articles, since the additional time to do that over and above the cropping and OCR time was fairly insignificant.

Where I’ve processed the full issue, it’s linked below. I have some articles from issues that I have not scanned in full in here as well. I will update this post when I’ve scanned them in full, but probably also recapitulate it in a new blog post for those.

If you don’t want to wade through what’s below, the full issues are: July 1981 (79MB) and October 1982 (243MB). August 1982 (217MB) is complete except the back cover.

Softalk 1981 July

Softalk1981 07

Softalk 1981 November

Softalk1981 11

Softalk 1982 April

Softalk1982 04

Softalk 1982 August

Softalk1982 08

Softalk 1982 October

Softalk1982 10

Softalk 1984 January

Softalk1984 01

Softalk 1984 July

Softalk1984 07

Softalk 1984 August (final issue)

Softalk1984 08

A couple of Softalks

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Mar 252012
 

The Softalk magazine (1980–1984) has become surprisingly rare. Surprising because it used to actually be given for free (at least for a while) to anyone who bought an Apple. And it was a good magazine too. But although many other computer magazines of the 80s have been scanned and made it into various online archives, Softalk is conspicuously absent.

Softalk 1980 09 cover Softalk 1981 11 cover

Scouring the net, I have managed to find a few. Yesterday I found a couple that were hosted in Switzerland and for me at least downloaded very slowly (by my estimate, at about 2400 baud), which prompts me to now host a mirror of those copies of those few that I have so far acquired. Someday I hope to physically have the magazines again, at which point I’ll attempt non-destructive color scans. I still may have some of those physical issues somewhere (I was a subscriber from 1982–1984), but I have not as of yet been able to find them.

So far, I have the following issues sourced in a couple of different places (but I suspect mostly the work of one person). They are not great. For one thing, they are mostly black and white, and (presumably on some kind of principle, possibly legal), the advertisements have been removed. (While I’m sure that it took a lot of time and effort to remove them, I also miss the ads, they’re interesting too, 30 years on.) The covers were also often not included. In at least one place I noticed, a page was duplicated. But, it’s better than nothing, for the moment.

[Addition: Steven Weyhrich has a page of images of many of the covers and column banners posted at his Apple II History site, and for a couple of years has been specifically scanning some of the ads from the pages of Softalk, organized by year and hardware/software.]