Paper as History Logging medium: new Book

[Jules Richardson]

John Honniball wrote:
> John Allain wrote:
> 
>> How about this for a new book?
>>
>> "Digital Retro :
>>  The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer"
>>     by Gordon Laing   
>> Amazon.com informs me that it was published just three weeks ago.
>> Wonder if anyone here has seen it yet?
> 
> 
> Are you sure that date is correct?  I bought a copy
> in a bookshop here about a year ago.

Yep, my memory is that they came round to take photos of stuff around a 
year ago. It's certainly been out for quite a while. I think there was 
talk of a second edition sometime, but I haven't heard anything about 
that for a while.

>> A reviewer says its set up as Amstrad to Zenith, with photos,
>>    might be kind of fluffy.
> 
> It's mostly photos, yes.  Not a great deal of technical
> info.  Sometimes doesn't even tell you which microprocessor
> the computer runs on.  Very nice photos, though, and some
> of them taken at the Museum of Computing in Swindon.

Yep, some are from Swindon, most of them are ours (Bletchley), and a 
handful were from private collections. The plan was always for a coffee 
table type of book, so there's not much technical info in there at all.

I seem to remember it was something of an oddball list too when they 
were initially looking for machines - there were some surprising things 
on there, whilst several important machines seemed to be missing.

Annoyingly (as a couple of my own machines are in there) I've never 
actually seen a copy except for a 30 second flick through once!

cheers

Jules