Classic Atari OnLine interview Classic Atari OnLine interview
__________________________________ \ Digital Antic Project \(I recently eMailed K Savetz about his new Digital Antic Project. He has gotten permission from Antic Publishing to reprint Antic magazines on his homepage)
CAO: Why are you doing this?
KS: I want to give something back to the Atari user community on the Internet. I have gotten so much pleasure from my Atari 800 over the years, and I know that many others have from theirs. Antic magazine was a prime source of information and games, and there's still a lot of useful stuff in there. It doesn't seem right to let that all be locked away in someone's attic, so the Digital Antic Project will make it available to everyone on the Internet.
CAO: Do you think 8-bit computers still have life in them?
KS: Absolutely! That is evident by the number of Atari users sharing information on the Internet, and particularly Usenet. Users of classic computers of all types are a thriving community. Certainly not as thriving as it was 15 years ago :)
CAO: Will the issues be available only on your web site or are you going to make 'packets' available for downloading and reading at a later time? (packets meaning issue number 1 with all pics and text).
KS: It was important to me to do this "nice and legal." I'm a writer and would not want anyone putting my work online, even 13 years after I wrote it. So I asked Jim Capparell, the publisher of Antic and STart, for permission to go ahead with the project. He agreed. By the way, Jim is now publisher of Mac Home Journal magazine. Jim game me permission to put the issues on the Internet. He has explicitly told me not to distribute the material on online services, BBSs, etc. So I think we'll play it safe by just keeping it online at the Web site. If folks want to download or print articles themselves, they can do that.
Other stuff: Several users have asked me about putting Analog and other Atari magazines on the Internet. I think that is a great idea, but right now I'm coordinating the digification of 100+ issues of Antic, and I don't know how many issues of STart, so I'll be busy with that for a while. If someone else wants to try to do a similar thing with Analog, great! (Just get permission from the publisher first. The rights to the articles may not be theirs, so it may not even be possible.)
By the way, my goal is to add an issue a week, so at this rate it could take a couple of years to get them all online. The project really needs volunteers with scanners and OCR software. (You don't even need Antics. Other volunteers can lend you some.) With the right people, we could get this done in less than a year. Current volunteers are scanning cover images and proofreading the online articles.