I'm so torn. I've got BYTEs from 1976 through the early 80s and I love flipping through them - there's just nothing like having a paper copy to find things you didn't even know you were looking for. But the space they take up is getting too valuable... And now archive.org has all those magazines digitized... Its hard to prioritize the classic books and magazines vs other non-essential life detritus.
I'd NEVER get rid of my old Bytes, Creative Computing and Dr Dobbs. That's MY youth. Spending time at The Computer Store in Bryn Mawr, PA playing with their Processor Technology SOL-20 and wishing I could afford one.
I hear you, I have a bunch of old Transactor magazines from the '80s (hardcore Commodore programming magazine) that I'd like to give to a deserving home.
On the non-programming front, I have a ton of old issues of Climbing magazine from the '90s that are completely awesome but I have no one to give them to.
I guess I could place a "giving away for free" ad on Craigslist but it would be cool to have a more dedicated site for this kind of thing.
At Cognopolis there is the Holoteca, a collection of collections. They have many tecas with lots of stuff, from one of the largest comics collections to bugs and shells and thousands of dictionaries (and many other stuff)
I had the entire run of, ahem, Commodore RUN Magazine, and had a great time flipping through them as you describe. But when I moved, I didn't consider them worth moving and put them in the recycle bin. At nearly 20 years old, they were starting to get the yellowing and musty smell like ancient Playboys have. Later I realized that they might have fetched a few dollars on eBay, but the biggest regret was trying to find a reference for something (specifically, this Neuromancer video game ad from 1989 [0]) that I knew was in them. Then I found that someone had scanned them all put them on bittorrent, including the disk images from the Special Issues.
So I miss the nostalgia of flipping through the pages, but it's truly the content that has value.
I only kept copies of the ones that I had articles in, the rest went to other collectors with more space than I had. Something I found surprising was all the memories that old digitized copies of Radio Shack catalogs had for me. There isn't anything quite like the Radio Shack of the 80's any more.
I know what you mean. I wound up getting rid of my collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, Popular Electronics, etc. years ago. I can still remember when a new issue arrived, how I would carefully read every single word, including the ads.
Care to send me one? ;) We just threw out boxes full of old computer magazines when my parents moved. I just kept one as a memento (so did my dad). That seemed like a sensible trade-off.
