I’m not sure if anyone else here has stumbled on this great piece of retro-computing history yet, but here goes:
The most iconic PCC issues - netzherpes
I checked out a few of them by following the download link near the bottom of the page, and the quality is kind of hit-or-miss, but the collection is easily the most complete I’ve seen.
The story behind these scans illustrates what working together all over the world can accomplish!
On my retro website I have published many KIM-1 related magazine articles. Some were written by Bob Leedom, games developed on his KIM-1 around 1980. Some published in PCC magazine, of which mediocre scans are on archive.org.
After Ruud Baltissen published his ideas about building a KIM reproduction, where the unobtainable 6530 RRIOTs were replaced with 6532 RIOT and a ROM, I helped Vince Briel develop the MICRO KIM.
After Vince stopped the MICRO KIM production, a Chinese genius Liu Ganning developed the PAL-1, a MICRO KIM clone, as KIM-1 compatible kit. Again my site played an essential role in providing KIM-1 information. The PAL-1 is available on Tindie.
On my website I publish many KIM-1 programs from my own collection of the eighties and other sources, manuals, articles, news. That helped getting the PAL-1 ball rolling!
The other KIM clone by the late Bob Applegate also benefitted from the KIM-1 clone community. Dave Williams did KIM-1 Reproductions, in Germany and Spain KIM-1 boards were developed. The KIM-1 lives!
Nils, nickname netzherpes, build the PAL-1 kit and had much fun with it. He found the Bob Leedom articles on my site, typed in some, and did a web search for Bob Leedom.
Bob is still around and Nils and Bob worked together on getting Bob’s software running on the PAL-1 (which is a real KIM-1!).
Bob had a stash of PCC magazines, and send those to Nils in Germany, a big box!
Nils did a great job and spent many hours scanning those, you can see the results on his site. Old newspaper quality, in a not too perfect state, so the scans vary.
Thanks to Nils and bob Leedom for the preservation of a part of computing history.
Hans
are the Internet Archive: “People’s Computer Company” scans that bad? I’m assuming they are copies of the ones from the CHM archive People’s Computer Company; People’s Computers; Recreational Computing | Computer History Museum, and those have always seemed pretty clear to me.
I hadn’t seen those before either. That’s a nice collection as well. You can mix and match with the ones Nils uploaded there to see for yourself which ones are the most legible. I don’t have an opinion for a clear winner, but it’s certainly not a bad thing to have a bit of redundancy.
Oh, those are kind of broken because the user decided to upload them as two separate PDFs and confused Archive’s book processing system. I can barely browse the pages.
A single zip of images is all the Archive needs and it will make better, more searchable PDFs than any human can
I very much appreciate your efforts, in collating and publishing and helping people find each other! As noted, it’s good to have redundancy, and good to have well-indexed curated collections.
Yay, you found those pages on archive.
The print quality of the Newpapers was never intended to last 50 years, so the Paper quality of the PCCs is nearly rotten. I decided to upload 2 versions of each issue. One is the original, one is a whiteballanced version.
I’ve made very large PDF files, that you can only view as original in it’s big size when you download it from archive.org - you will have the option to download both files
OR ---- try out my google drive:
PCC – Google Drive
Nils - netzherpes