Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in standards for components, performance specs of components over time. All at the time of the Cambrian explosion of computing

Also wow this is a gargantuan effort. I scanned thee equivalent of like one issue of Computer Shopper one time and it was painful. Kudos to the author.

For any moderately large scale book scanning effort: https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...

> debinding

When I was in school, there was a binding shop nearby which had a huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine, only shallower, that just sliced through thick books like butter. They stuck the book in a vice grip, turned a wheel which brought that beautiful sharp heavy blade down on the hopeless book stuck in the grip below and the paper shavings just blossomed out of the other side as the blade did its job.

One of the favorite things for us to do was to bring an old book to the shop and ask then to shave off few millimeters on each side (except the spine of course) - the frayed/yellow bits were gone and your book was new and born again :) This also was a great strategy if you wanted to reduce the dimensions of your book. Obviously only works with paperbacks and can't be repeated more than 3-4 times. I loved it then.

> In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the glued issues of Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue starts to become slightly liquid and then carefully pulling the pages apart from each other, placing them on a large table I’m working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It’s a huge mess, and with hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work.

I wonder if instead of using heat-gun to de-glue (?), it would be easier to just shave off an ever thin slice of that spine?

(sorry if that was too gruesome for you).

Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older) Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't want to damage the pages, even if the damage seems infinitesimal.

It doesn't happen so much anymore for manga since things are mostly digital. Though some publishers still publish at 1200x800 (looking at you, Hakusensha!) or worse (I think one site uses like, 900x600?). Mostly these days this would only happen for self-published works (which are still distributed in limited quantities and in physical format only, oftentimes). Or apparently publishers occasionally just...lose the digital files. (Though I can't find where I read this anymore.)

>>” Of course some people would pack a laptop (yes, they existed in the 1990's) in a car, drive out to a convenience store in the middle of nowhere at 2:00 in the morning, and "beige box" off a COCOT (customer owned coin operated telephone) to make those calls. I might have been guilty of doing something like that...”

Ohhh man! I was just a few years too late for that but I remember reading and hearing about it. It was a dream of mine! Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.