It's Full Of Stars
==================
[ 8bit is very much alive over at personalcomputernews.co.uk, which blends a
slick user experience with quality retro content and comes from the talents
of former 8BS contributor, Dave Edwards ]

The 8bit age was fantastic - the birth of technology which grew to change the
entire world. As people began to appreciate just what computers could do, every
manufacturer was tripping over himself to launch the next big "home micro". You
had these on one side - the sort of hobbyist computers for playing games and
learning Basic, and the 'big' IBM-PC machines - the computers that your Dad
might have in his office to produce spreadsheets or do the payroll. Of course,
it came to pass that the 'big' machines conquered all, and fiddling around with
Basic to do one thing or another became harder and harder.

But really, if you had any interest in computing and electronics, what times to
have been alive, eh? Loads of machines, loads of software, loads of choice. In
fact, far too much choice. Because, whilst many of us know our BBCs, Spectrums,
Amstrads and Commodores (and if we don't, then the Internet is only too willing
to educate us!), there are less of us that know about the Jupiter Ace, the
Graduate, the Torch, the Dragon 32, the Toshiba MSX, the Tandy Models, the
Enterprise and the glut of machines that only a handful of people ever bought.
But these machines existed, and, had the cards fallen differently in the
history of British Microcomputing, any one of them could have been serious
contenders for the crown of most popular home micro.

Of course, we know what the most popular home micro was - the good old Sinclair
Spectrum. It was the best because of the sheer ubiquity of games released for
it; every one, to my mind, a digital work of art. Its graphics were inferior to
those on similar machines at the time of its release, but it never really lost
its footing until there were 16-bit machines like the Amiga doing the rounds.
From 1983 to 1988 it was practically The King of the home circuit, and though
other computers rattled its base, they never succeeded in shaking it out of its
throne. This being so, its not necessarily surprising that, if you pick up a
copy of Retro Gamer magazine nowadays, you find the Spectrum (and other
'popular' Eighties machines) take up much of the page space. There's a thriving
emulation community at work still making games for Sir Clive's rubber-keyed
beast, and there's a few hundred thousand downloads available for users to
wallow in Eighties nostalgia.

And yes, this is brilliant. But only up to a point. Because to truly live the
8bit age, you should feel immersed in it again. If you go hunting for the best
Commodore 64 games, for example, you're obviously going to find some beauties
to play upon and you'll come away thinking "That was really a great game
considering the limitations of the hardware it was written on". But what you
won't gain any appreciation of is the timeline that led to the creation of that
game; whether it's release came out-of-the-blue from some unknown programming
genius or whether the game is even a conversion of an ever better game on a
different computer.

The Internet however, is able to immerse us all in 8bit wonder, by simply
presenting archives of the news reports and stories from the era. I'm talking,
naturally enough of magazines like Your Computer and Personal Computer News,
which took a broad-brush approach respectively to the developments of the month
and week. Contained within their pages is the sheer pace of development, the
exuberance of the reaction to some newly-released machines and products and the
indifference to others. But whilst games seem to have been archived in almost
their entirety, magazine scans have not been afforded the same treatment.

Up until the beginning of 2011, I was kept busy with archiving for a particular
computer - the Acorn Electron - on the website www.acornelectron.co.uk. This
website grew from the Electron User Group which ran from 1991 until the late
Noughties. Unfortunately, having collected books, hardware, software, ROMs and
magazines furiously for many years, finding anything new became impossible.
Literally, I had it all and what was missing may never be found (or may never
have existed).

Naturally enough however, I needed another project to fill those winter nights,
and a few cursory Internet searches revealed that no-one was currently 
archiving Personal Computer News magazine (Your Computer had already been taken
care of, see http://yourcomputeronline.wordpress.com/). To my delight I found
that http://www.personalcomputernews.co.uk was also still available as a
domain, hence began my contribution to modern electronic immersion in the 8bit
age - which sounds a lot better than "scanning magazines and then putting them
on the Internet for people to read".

At time of writing, Personal Computer News features 11 issues from a 110-strong
run (so exactly 10% of the issues). But this is a project that is being put
together with the most tender of tender-loving care. Because the paper-based
magazine itself, for all the informativeness of its copy, was hardly
aesthetically pleasing. It featured black and white illustrations and diagrams,
blurry screenshots of games and a plethora of intrusive advertisements. The
website however, is modern, colourful and indexed, featuring animations,
genuine in-game screenshots and easy navigation, whilst retaining all the
content.

So what exactly will you find there? Well, the key thing is not just your
regular BBC, Spectrum, Amstrad or Commodore 64 musings. Think more obscure.
Camputers' Lynx, Brother printers (Remember them?), the Sinclair QL, the
HBD-50 Sony disk drive... But most importantly, perhaps only here will you find
reviews of the machines that never made it, that have seemingly been confined
to the pages of history that no-one since 1985 has re-read. And that's not all.
Because to really give that feeling of immersion, you'll find that all of the
graphics, throughout the site (and with the obvious exceptions of Sir Clive
Sinclair and Lord Sugar's grinning mugshots), are rendered in 8 bit colours.
You can even move plain text versions of all of the articles, and their
graphics, to any 8-bit computer you wish - with the minimum of fuss.

With all of these (to me, essential) touches, creating a digital issue of PCN
takes a long time. Hence I am relying to a very small extent on 8bit
officiandos visiting the site and buying a box set of the PCN DVDs. For `13.95,
you can buy the entire digital and scan archive (the entire run of 110 issues
is available in scan format of course) and, for every 3 box sets I sell, I will
create another digital issue of the magazine for you all to enjoy. Are you
looking to help others immerse themselves in the heady world of 8bit? Are you
as intrigued as I am by the hundreds of machines that died as soon as they were
born? Who knows? You might have once owned one of these mystery machines. You
might still have it upstairs in a cupboard. It could be that you, personally,
own a machine to which reference is completely missing from the Internet. Head
on over and immerse yourself in the world I have created over at
www.personalcomputernews.co.uk.

Browsing through an issue brings this fantastic age back to life in a way that
playing an old game cannot, whilst presenting all the information in a method
that feels fresh and powerful by modern standards. At least, that's my
intention. And to those of you who know little about the frentic pace of 8bit
in those early years, the educational element alone should be enough to really
make the trip worthwhile.