Sinclair User scans down?

Mousey

I may have missed an announcement somewhere (I did a quick forum search, honest), but have discovered today that the SU scans - in fact the entire website - seems to be down / gone:

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/

I assume this isn't just me, as I tried various other magazine scans and they all work fine.

Is this temporary? Obviously all the links on WoS point to it.

ewgf

Down for me too, and http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ also confirms it being down.

Alessandro Grussu

I noticed it too about a month ago. Maybe we should contact Dave Foreman about that.

On the other hand, you can still peruse the scans in the WOS archive.

hackersanon

Hello, all..

I've emailed Dave, so fingers crossed!

Toodle-pip!
Gerard

impomatic

hackersanon wrote: »

Hello, all..

I've emailed Dave, so fingers crossed!

Toodle-pip!
Gerard

Did you ever get a response from Dave?

Thanks

ewgf

I hope he's OK. Dave and I conversed on a few topics, and he seemed like a decent and interesting bloke.

KenD

Shameless plug: SU scans, and a ton of others, here :)

ewgf

KenD wrote: »

Shameless plug: SU scans, and a ton of others, here :)

That's great! I love the way the scans have been OCR-d, so that they contain pure text that you can copy and paste, and also that they take up less storage space than PDFs that just contain JPG images of the pages. So thanks for both the download links, and also for the undoubtedly long and hard work necessary to create PDF files where the text is real text. I'll definitely be replacing my jpg-only PDF copies of the magazines with your versions.

KenD

ewgf wrote: »

KenD wrote: »

Shameless plug: SU scans, and a ton of others, here :)

That's great! I love the way the scans have been OCR-d, so that they contain pure text that you can copy and paste, and also that they take up less storage space than PDFs that just contain JPG images of the pages. So thanks for both the download links, and also for the undoubtedly long and hard work necessary to create PDF files where the text is real text. I'll definitely be replacing my jpg-only PDF copies of the magazines with your versions.

Thank you :) It was originally just an experiment to see how well comparatively low-res and "noisy" scans turned into searchable PDFs. Although the text doesn't always "flow" that well (especially during the mid-1980's where just about magazine page layout went quite mad with whacky fonts, white-text-on-yellow-backgrounds, and text that jumped sides of the page halfway through a paragraph), having the ability to search over a decade of cross-platform magazine output for specific words or phrases appeals to the geek hoarder archivist in me :)

ewgf

You've also made it possible for future writers to copy and paste any text that they wish from the magazines, which potentially could help anyone from a school boy/girl writing a report about the first era of wide-spread video gaming, to a professional history chronicler writing about the beginning/general public acceptance of home video games.

You have to wonder, when the time comes that people look back on the 1980s and the beginning of video games in the same way that we now look back at the beginning of the industrial revolution or of the electrical age, what sort of electric entertainment people in that future will be enjoying? Maybe the total immersion virtual reality you-really-are-there type of simulations, like on Red Dwarf or The Matrix!

Living through the 1980s was brilliant, from a gaming point of view, but I hope that virtual reality gaming (that's actually good, and preferably fully convincing and immersive) becomes a reality in my lifetime. It's extremely unlikely (even if I start exercising and easting well to prolong my life!) but it would be brilliant to experience genuine virtual reality (and not the purely sight and sound virtual reality that we're expecting in the next couple of years).