It's (More Than) a Start

I've already mentioned how the "old computer magazine most intriguing to me for being out of reach" changed from Creative Computing to Softalk. With the first title, when I began digging into online archives of scanned magazines I'd at least managed quite a while before to take in its last year of publication (starting with a self-congratulatory tenth anniversary issue), books reprinting articles from its first years, and some issues from in between. With Softalk, I was just going on comments from other people how its sudden disappearance had seemed to mark the end of an era for Apple users. (It also so happened that I came upon the short run of another Apple magazine that had included a column by Softalk's former editor, dwelling to some extent on the mid-1980s hangover from the cyber-utopianism of the first few years of that decade, and at one point trying to put a brave face on the thought the computer market had saturated at as insignificant a size as "the avid reader population.")

Along the way, I did happen on what proclaimed itself an organised project to scan in Softalk, but for all the length of time the site had been around it didn't seem to have any genuine content. I bookmarked it anyway and kept checking it every so often, and a news item did show up about how the project was going to be working with the Internet Archive, now home to great quantities of other scanned magazines. Again, though, I still had a bit of a feeling of "promises, promises."

On getting back from vacation, however, I managed to see in the Twitter feed in a sidebar on the site that the first two issues of the magazine had been uploaded to the Internet Archive. While I already had a different, higher-quality scan of the first issue, it was something tangible, and I contemplated making a post about it only to wind up thinking it still might be better to wait for this to be something more than a "one-time accomplishment." The waiting came to a sudden end, though, when I did a bit more checking and saw that all of a sudden the archive had expanded from two of forty-eight issues to forty-two of forty-eight. A comment I'd seen years ago sprang to mind: "You could have knocked me down with a feather."

Of course, even as I begin downloading the issues (not quite as small in file size or nearly as sludgy-looking in their graphics as some of the material I've found on the Internet Archive) and starting a journey that will end with having to face how a potential experience has become reality and boundless imagination will have to be compared to mundane reality, I'm wondering about the last six issues not in the archive yet. There remain two Creative Computing magazines from 1983 not in the archive; I managed to buy one of them in an online auction a while ago, and I've now paid for the other one, but until it shows up I suppose I'm left thinking I can't be certain I'll actually get it until I have it.