New vintage computing publication

From: Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter <news_at_computercollector.com>
Date: Thu Apr 8 19:12:11 2004

Hi everyone,

Having conferred with Jay West, I'd now like to
introduce the readers of this mailing list to a new
publication, the Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter.

A few of you already know me as evan947_at_yahoo, the guy
who collects handhelds/PDAs. More than a few of you
know Michael Nadeau, formerly of Byte magazine, who
founded the Classic Tech E-Letter a few years ago.

Meanwhile, I and Sellam Ismail (who EVERYONE knows)
pondered starting a print magazine for the hobby last
fall. Ultimately we decided the hobby just isn't big
enough yet to support that.

Instead, early this year Mike handed over the reigns
of his newsletter to me. For those who don't know me,
besides being a computer collector, I (like Mike) am a
veteran technology reporter. Paid my dues at Gannett
(which owns USA Today and other papers), was a staff
engineer at a product review lab for telecom gear, and
spent 3.5 years at eWeek (formerly PC Week.) I'm 29
and grew up on Apple and Atari.

The first thing I did as the new editor is change the
name. I think "Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter"
is more intuitive and will help attractive people who
aren't necessarily familiar with our growing hobby.

I also changed some of the fundamentals. Before, the
newsletter had infrequent publishing, and in each
issue an attempt was made to cover all of the news out
there. That's a difficult way to run things. So now,
the newsletter is published every Monday. Also, in
every issue we have one main article (news, opinion,
etc.), vs. trying to be a comprehensive news outlet
every single week.

By "we" I mean myself, Mike, Sellam, and author
Christine Finn (Christine's known for writing the book
"Articacts: An archeologist's year in Silicon
Valley"), and Erik Klein, who runs
www.vintage-computer.com.

Of course we did not want to overlap with this mailing
list. Tech tips are clearly this list's domain. So
with the newsletter we're sticking to the root word:
news. To be crystral-clear, we're not a forum, and
we're not going to duplicate existing efforts.

We also didn't want to duplicate fragment the existing
online classified ads and marketplaces of Sellam's and
Erik's web sites. So instead they each send me their
top three or four ads on alternate weeks, which I
publish in the newsletter. Along with the ads there's
a link that says "click here for more," taking readers
to their respective sites.

So as you can see, we've revamped the old Classic Tech
E-Letter into something that's fresh, consistent, and
clearly carving out its own niche.

Besides the few of us behind the scenes, we also
solicit guest writers. For example, Visicalc legend
Dan Bricklin gave us a column, as did the Digibarn's
Bruce Damer. Macintosh inventor Jef Raskin did an
interview with us. We interviewed the CTO of
Hewlett-Packard's printer division, and even IBM's
David Bradley -- better known as the guy who invented
Ctrl-Alt-Delete. We also went to suburban
Philadelphia to write about a video game conference.

We currently have about 450 subscribers. On our
informational site, which is
news.computercollector.com, there is additional
content. There's a computer history bookstore, a
small but growing page of tales from collectors, an
events calendar, a summary of our articles to date,
and yes, some lame Google ads to help us pay for the
hosting.

Anyway, the newsletter is FREE, and if you subscribe
we promise to never, ever give away your email address
or send you spam. We also would love to have some of
you write guest columns. The slate is wide open;
write about anything you're passionate about in the
hobby. If you're not a writer, then just send us your
ideas for articles, and/or news we should be aware of.

Sometimes, we'll make factual mistakes, and we promise
to be vigilant about identifying and correcting those.
 As I told Sellam, I respect and fear that most of the
readers of the classiccmp lists know way more about
computer history than I ever will. So please bear
with us when, not if, we mess up.

Thanks for taking this time to read this long message.
 To subscribe to the newsletter, go to our site
(again, that's news.computercollector.com), click the
subscribe link, and just put in your email address.

Thanks again,

 Evan Koblentz

PS -- I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you
visit the area and want to chat about vintage
computing over a drink, I'm always interested.
Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 19:12:11 BST