While RUN was primarily a Commodore 64 magazine, it did cover other Commodore 8-bit computers over the years. In the early days, that meant the VIC-20. The March 1984 issue of RUN includes:
Features
In Search of a Tenth Planet - How one astronomer uses a Commodore 64 to help him search for a 10th planet.
Spreadsheets Uncovered - A general overview of spreadsheet software as well as a look at specific examples, including BCalc, BusiCalc 64, Easy Calc Result, ESP-Calc, Home-Calc, PracticalC64, and more.
Serpent of Death - A type-in Egyptian themed game for the VIC-20.
Baja 1000 - A type-in game for the VIC-20 in which you must flee a pursuing helicopter in your Jeep.
Scaling Ivy-Covered Walls - A type-in program for the Commodore 64 that helps you choose the right college by providing various information.
A Touch-Sensitive Issue - An overview of graphics tablets, a popular input device for a brief period of time, and some of the software that support them. The KoalaPad was probably the most popular.
Unveiling of the TED - A preview of the upcoming Commodore 264 (A.K.A. the Plus 4). While it had some interesting features, overall the Commodore 64 was a better machine (especially for games) and the Plus 4 was a complete market failure.
Table of Contents from the March 1984 issue of RUN
Departments
RUNning Ruminations - The introduction of the Plus/4 coincides with Jack Tramile leaving Commodore.
MAGIC - Short programming snippet for performing magic on your Commodore. This month, scrolling stars, delay loops, repeating keys, resetting a VIC-20 and Commodore 64, programming function keys, disabling the list command, and much more.
Commodore Clinic - Questions answered about PET, C64 and VIC-20 compatibility, RS232 adapters for the C64, changing the blink speed of the C64 cursor, printers for the C64, reverse scrolling on the C64, printing graphics from the C64, interfacing the VIC-20 with a robot arm, and more.
Software Gallery - Reviews of Bandits (VIC-20), The Battle of Blackpoole (Commodore 64), Delta Drawing (Commodore 64), VIC Forth (VIC-20), and Benji's Space Rescue (Commodore 64).
For Gamesters Only - Tips and strategies for Computer Wars (VIC-20), Submarine Commander (VIC-20), Neutral Zone (Commodore 64), Beach-Head (Commodore 64), and Archon (Commodore 64).
Video Casino - A type-in game for the VIC-20 called Tunnel Run in which make your way through various tunnels while escaping aliens.
Mail RUN - Letters from readers mostly commenting about the premiere issue of RUN.
“For three years, the U.S. government has been tied in knots over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, frustrated that China’s hindrance of investigations and unwillingness to look critically at its own research have obscured what intelligence agencies can learn about whether the virus escaped from a lab,” reported Julian Barnes. “Inquiries during the Trump and Biden administrations have yielded no definitive answers.”
That the conversation on the origins of the virus is shifting from “preponderance of evidence” to “definitive answers” is itself evidence that we may be closer to answering the mystery of COVID’s origins than many realize.
Patient Zero?
In November 2019, three lab researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China became severely ill, according to a U.S. intelligence reportobtained bytheWall Street Journalin 2021. The researchers, whose identities were not disclosed, became so sick they were hospitalized, the report stated. The timing of the event is noteworthy. The three lab workers, theJournalnoted, were hospitalized in November 2019, “roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, first began circulating around the central Chinese city of Wuhan.”
Two years later, the identities of the three lab workers allegedly hospitalized were revealed. US government sources identified the three lab researchers as Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu,according torecent reporting from Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag inPublic.
The Atlanticnotedthe “extraordinary” nature of the findings, if true.
“These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeroes aren’t merely employees of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing since the start of the pandemic,” writes Daniel Engber. “Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses.”
Hu’s name is especially important. The man many are dubbing “patient zero” didn’t just work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to documents published by the White Coat Waste Project obtained via a FOIA request, Hu was receiving US grant money to perform gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.
“The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci,” theInterceptreports. “Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.”
Pretty Specific Symptoms
These are not the only important details that have many suspecting Hu is “patient zero.” There’s also the fact that he was a top lieutenant of Shi Zhengli, a scientist literally named “batwoman” for her extensive research on viruses taken from bats in caves. And then there’s the fact that unreleased intelligence reportedly says the sick lab workers lost their sense of smell—one of the telltale signs of COVID.
“That doesn’t medically prove that they had COVID but that’s some pretty specific symptoms,” Josh Rogin of theWashington Postnoted inan interview with Bari Weiss.
Finally, asSciencenotes, Hu is an “appealing suspect” because he “was a lead author on a 2017 paper in PLOS Pathogens describing an experiment that created chimeric viruses by combining genes for surface proteins from bat coronaviruses that would not grow in cultures with the genome of one that did. This paper has received intense scrutiny because it was partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) … .”
None of this is a “definitive answer,” of course. And Hu claims the entire story is “fake news.”
“The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,” Huwrote in an emailtoScience. “In autumn 2019, I was neither sick nor had any symptoms related to COVID-19.”
That Hu would deny involvement in the incident is hardly surprising.
“Denials of culpability and dismissals of evidence by a likely culpable person cannot be taken at face value,”saidRutgers Professor Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist.
The Smoking Gun?
That those responsible for the deadliest pandemic in a century would not wish to take responsibility for it should not surprise us. And I’m not just talking about Ben Hu.
There’s little reason to believe the Chinese government would be forthcoming if their investigation determined they were responsible for COVID-19. Similarly, there’s little reason to believe the US government, which was funding China’s coronavirus research, would be eager to get to the truth either.
Let’s not forget there was a serious effort by the US government to prevent Americans from even openlyspeculatingabout the lab-leak theory. In February 2021, almost certainly at the behest of federal agencies, whichwere working with social media platformsto combat COVID “misinformation,” Facebook announced it would remove posts that suggested “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” Months later, after it became widely accepted that the lab-leak theory was not “a crackpot idea” after all, Facebook wasforced to backtrack.
Today many agencies within the federal government itself concede that the lab-leak theory isn’t just possible, but the most likely cause of COVID.
“The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2,”a reportfrom the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found.
Indeed, a preponderance of evidence is emerging that points to the Wuhan lab, and Hu may turn out to be the key.
“It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else,” Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editingtoldPublic. “That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”
Dizzy With Success
That the deadliest pandemic in a century might have been triggered by scientists pursuing risky genetic research in pursuit of a “greater good” should not surprise us.
“Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some ‘noble’ goal,” the philosopher Leonard Read once observed.
Nor should it surprise us if it’s found that the Chinese government (with help from the US) was responsible. Governments have been responsible for the worst atrocities in history, usually while using collective force to advance utopia. This includes famous genocides like the Holocaust, the Holdomor, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but also eugenics policiesthat forcibly sterilized tens of thousandsof Americans to create a “purer race.”
A half-century ago, F.A. Hayek warned about humanity becoming essentially drunk—“dizzy with success”—in their faith in the physical sciences, “which tempts man to try…to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.” He feared humanity’s faith in its ability to control the physical world stood to make those who controlled it a “destroyer of a civilization.”
Hayek was alluding to collectivism when he made these remarks inhis Nobel Prize-winning speech, but it’s a similar Frankenstein-like hubris that lurks in gain-of-function research—which NIHcontinued to pursuedespite warnings and pauses.
If the lab-leak theory turns out to be true, don’t expect these officials to be any more forthcoming than Ben Hu.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
These photos appear to be from the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first features a Confederate grave. Presumably the people in the picture are related but I can't make out the name compeletely. A similar shot showed up in a previous set. I'm not sure where this is but there is a guy wearing an Alabama hat so that seems a resonable possibility. The second photo features what looks like a church with someone sitting on the steps. The third photo shows a boy next to what looks like a cabin in the woods. It looks like it could be the set of a horror movie, especially looking at the fourth photo...
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
RUN was one of the top Commodore 8-bit magazines, mostly covering the Commodore 64. 1985 was probably nearing the height of the Commodore 64's popularity but it would live on for a long time to come. The November 1985 issue includes:
Features
Commodore to the Rescue - An article about CASIE (Computer-Assisted Search Information Exchange), Commodore 64 software used by rescuers to locate missing people.
Communications Software: A Vital Link - An overview of available terminal software, including HomePak, SkiWRiter II, The SMART 64 Terminal, Sixth Sense, and VIP XL. Prices range from $40 to $70.
Print Screen Plus - A type-in program that can make a screen dump to a printer, including text, lo-res and hi-res graphics.
Sprite Control in C-128 Mode - Using sprites in BASIC 7 on the Commodore 128 with type-in code examples.
Make a Little Music - A type-in program that turns sheet music into Commodore 64 music.
Bach to Basic - Techniques for creating music on the Commodore 64 along with code examples.
Datafile Restructure Utility - This type-in program allows you to modify the structure of files created with Datafiles, including changing the length of a title, changing the length of a field, adding additional fields, and deleting existing fields.
Brainstorming - Type-in software to help organize brainstorming sessions.
Hardware Buyer's Guide - 1985 - A look at some of the best Commodore related hardware released in 1985, including the Aprospand-64 Expander, ALD-6412 A/D Converter, Aprotek 1000 EPROM Programmer, Computereyes, 80-Column Video Board, Ramdisk, The Spartan, the Commodore 128, BCD5-25 Disk Drive, SFD-1001, Commodore 1571 Disk Drive, Enhancer 2000, Lt. Kernal, MIDI Magic, Commodore 1660 and 1670 modems, and much more.
Table of Contents from the November 1985 issue of RUN
Table of Contents from the November 1985 issue of RUN (continued)
Departments
RUNning Ruminations - Highlights of the current issue, results of a Micro-Novel contest, and more.
Magic - Short programming tricks including several sprite demos, converting addresses to decimal, an improved INT function, and more.
Software Gallery - Reviews of Telemessage, a customizable BBS program; Better Working Spreadsheet, Eureka!, an adventure game; Beach Head II, a World War II themed action game sequel; PlayWriter/Adventures in Space, and educational story book creation software.
Commodore Clinic - Questions answered about cleaning keyboards, the Commodore 64 vs. the VIC-20 user ports, using a PCjr monitor with a Commodore 128, 80 columns on the Commodore 64, printing with Print Shop, using the 1541 disk drive with the Commodore 128, and much more.
Book Gallery - Reviews of books including Graphics for the Commodore 64 Computer, 1541 Single Drive Floppy Disk Maintenance Manual, and Using & Programming the Commodore 64.
This was one of Commodore's official publications and it tended to be quite good. In 1986 it was mainly covering the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 an the Amiga. The November/December 1986 issue includes:
Departments
Letters - Letters from readers about Way of the Exploding Fist and chess games.
News - New Microprint 2000 dot matrix printer from Micro Merics; The Big Blue Reader released which allows reading and writing files to DOS formatted disks with a Commodore 128 and 1571 disk drive; Commodore releases MPS1200 dot matrix printer; Commodore releases 1351 Mouse for the Commodore 64; Habitat premieres on QuantumLink; and more.
Telecommunications
Q-Link Update - An overview of some of the features on QuanumLink, a Commodore 64 dedicated online service. These features include Photo Gallery, Auction, Habitat, Casino, Auditorium Happenings, and Software Library.
Software Reviews
Mind Mirrors - A unique game? which includes Life Simulation.
Bop'n Wrestle - One of the earliest wrestling games and not a bad one for the time.
GBA Basketball - Two-on-two basketball in which each player controls two team members.
Infiltrator - An action game that includes both helicopter sim and ground based action.
Hacker II - Use your hacking skills against the Russians.
Table of Contents from the November/December 1986 issue of Commodore MicroComputers
Jiffies
Phone Messages - A type-in program that prints forms for recording phone messages.
Modem Answering Machine - A type-in program designed to allow other modem users to call your computer and leave a messsage.
Easydata-128 - A type-in program that redefines keys to make entering DATA statements easier.
Silicon Valley Insider
From Big Blue Reader to Tass Times in Tone Town - A brief look at new and upcoming products including Big Blue Reader, Street Sports Baseball, clip art for Print Shop, Little Computer People, and more.
Amiga Update
Public Domain Software for the Amiga - An overview of the free public domain software currently available for the Amiga.
128 Users Only
C128 Spectacular - A short type-in program for the Commodore 128 that demonstrates the power of BASIC 7.0.
64 Users Only
EditWedge - A type-in program that provides a variety of programming tools.
Windows - A BASIC program that allows you to add windowing to your own programs with the caveat that only one window can be active at a time.
Computer Tutor
Game Design, Part 5 - The fifth part of a game design tutorial. This part focusses on creating a new character set.
Let's C Now, Part 2 - Part two of a series on the C programming language.
Game Programs
Klondike Solitaire - Type-in solitaire game for the Commodore 64.
100 Mile Race - A type-in racing game for the Commodore 64 which in addition to just completing the course you must avoid obstacles such as pedestrians (no, they aren't worth extra points).
Features
Quantumlink's Habitat: The On-Line World From Lucasfilm Games - Everything old is new again. There was something resembling a metaverse for the Commodore 64 on QuantumLink decades ago.
The Best of 1986 - Reviewers choose the best products of the year for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Amiga. Some items included are Spy vs. Spy II, Leader Board, Elite, Great American Road Race, GEOS, Swiftcalc 128, Ace of Aces, Deluxe Video, Digi-View, Spartan, Alter Ego, The Newsroom, Certificate Maker, Ultima IV, Silent Service, Advanced Music System, and lots of others.
Back cover of the November/December 1986 issue of Commodore MicroComputers
Compute!'s Gazette was one of the most popular Commodore 8-bit magazines that existed in the U.S. I read Commodore Magazine and later Run myself but Gazette was easily on par with those. The December 1985 issue includes:
Features
New Approaches to Computer games: Designers with a Difference - An interview with video game designers John O'Neill, Tom Snyder, and others about the future of gaming.
Building Your Own Games - A talk with Pinball Construction Set designer Bill Budge about creating games.
Games at the Speed of Light - While it was thought for a while that laserdisc technology would have a big impact on home computers and gaming, this article also looks ahead to CD-ROM technology which would eventually become huge in another 8 years.
Reviews
The Epson HI-80 Plotter - A plotter for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 that works well in the Commodore 128's CP/M mode.
Calc Now! - A simple to use spreadsheet program for the Commodore 64.
Charles Goren: Learning Bridge Made Easy - Software that teaches you to play Bridge. It includes various quizzes, tutorials and examples.
The Halley Project - A game with educational properties in which you explore the solar system.
Table of Contents from the December 1985 issue of Compute!'s Gazette
Games
Whirlybird - A type-in game that is a sort of breakout clone with the bricks being on the bottom of the screen.
Quickchange - A type-in puzzle game.
Education/Home Applications
Banners - A type-in program that lets you print your own custom banners on the Commodore 64 Plus/4, Commodore 16 and VIC-20.
The Construction Set - A type-in program for the C64 that provides a sort of virtual lego set with which you can build things.
Programming
SpeedCheck: Word Processor Spelling Checker - A type-in spell checker that works with SpeedScript, WordPro, and PaperClip.
Power BASIC: List Pager - A short utility for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 that allows you to divide printouts into pages, insert headers, and print page numbers.
Variable Saver - A technique for automatically saving variables with your program along with an example short program for budgeting.
Hints & Tips: Loading and Saving - All about loading and saving files and directories.
Soundpix - A demo/tutorial that gives a visual representation of waveforms and envelopes on the Commodore 64.
Disk File Archiver - A short machine language program that helps with versioning and backing up your programs.
Departments
The Editor's Notes - The editor writes of waiting for the soon to be released Amiga.
Gazette Feedback - Feedback from readers about strings, formatting disks, the readability of programs, scanning the keyboard, programming function keys, VIC-20 support, RELative files, hexadecimal conversions, and more.
Simple Answers to Common Questions - Questions answered about 80 column display on the C64 and printer buffers.
Back cover of the December 1985 issue of Compute!'s Gazette
On Monday, President Biden announced $42 billion in funding to build internet infrastructure across the country, with the goal of getting every American connected to the internet by 2030. This is the “largest internet funding announcement in history,” the White House proudly noted, comparing it to FDR’s Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which provided federal loans that helped bring electricity to rural areas of the US.
Officially known as the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, the initiative aims to bring high-speed internet to the roughly 8.5 million households and small businesses that are still lacking this infrastructure. “High-speed internet is no longer a luxury,” the White House said. “It is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school, access health care, and to stay connected with family and friends.”
While it’s easy to see the benefits of increased internet access, the price for taxpayers isn’t exactly cheap. Doing the math, Rep. Thomas Massie pointed out that it will cost about $4,941 for each family that is connected to the internet. By contrast, Elon Musk’s Starlink can do the job for $599 per family, he noted.
Implementation questions aside, it’s worth asking, is this a good policy? Is it wise for the government to be spending money on these kinds of projects in general? Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by “good.” If “good” means funneling money to special-interest groups—as pretty much all government spending is designed to do—then yes, it will do that quite well. But if it means beneficial for the welfare of the masses, there are good reasons to believe spending projects like this actually work against that aim rather than facilitate it.
To understand why, we need to discuss a bit of economics.
The ‘Miracle’ Unmasked
One of the most important concepts in economics is the idea of scarcity. Our wants exceed our resources, which means there will always be trade-offs. Money spent on one initiative is money that can’t be spent elsewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
This is just as true for government spending as it is for anything else. Though it’s easy to focus on the benefits—in this case, the internet infrastructure that would be created—the good economist trains himself to see the hidden costs, the lost opportunities, the things that could have been funded and would have been built if only the money hadn’t been spent on the project in question.
Henry Hazlitt stressed this point in his book Economics in One Lesson. “Either immediately or ultimately,” he wrote, “every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter in this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.”
Though everyone would agree in principle that you can’t get something for nothing, it seems this truth gets completely forgotten the moment government spending comes up. “How could you be against internet infrastructure?” people might say. “Don’t you care about internet access?” Of course I do. But I also recognize that money spent on internet access is money that can’t be spent on food, healthcare, education, or housing. And unlike the proponents of these programs, I don’t presume to know what consumers most urgently need.
If people are managing fine without the internet but are desperate for more healthcare services, spending resources on more internet when those resources could have been used for more healthcare isn’t really helping. To take an extreme example, if I thought people really needed more pineapples, I could spend billions of dollars on pineapple infrastructure. And it’s true, there would be much better access to pineapples. But think of all the waste! So many more important things could have been created with those resources, but instead the most urgent wants are left unfulfilled because some politician thought pineapples were a higher priority for those funds than anything else.
The question, then, is not whether internet access is important. The question is whether it is more important than the alternatives. The mere existence of a benefit justifies nothing. The benefit must outweigh the cost. It must be more important than the opportunities that are foregone to achieve it.
So, how do we systematically determine which uses of resources are the most valuable to consumers? With the government, this is impossible. Politicians and planners are simply “groping in the dark,” as the economist Ludwig von Mises put it. Sure, they’ve got all sorts of statistics, but the statistics paint at best a blurry picture of the relative needs of consumers.
Fortunately, there is an alternative: the market. On the market, profits and losses signal to entrepreneurs the relative value consumers place on different goods and services. These signals lead to a remarkable coordination between the needs of consumers and what gets produced. It’s not perfect, of course, but at least there is a mechanism for rationally allocating resources to meet the most urgent needs of consumers as best as possible.
Government spending is at best a zero-sum game. It is taking resources that could have been used on one thing and using them on something else instead. But in practice it’s almost always worse than that, because market allocations tend to reflect the needs of consumers far better than government allocations. Thus, government spending inevitably wastes resources, directing them to the proverbial pineapple industry rather than the things consumers need most.
And it’s not like this issue can just be fixed with better managers. The managers aren’t the problem. It’s the system that’s the problem. As the economist Murray Rothbard noted in Power and Market, “The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents, resulting perhaps from the lack of a civil-service tradition. They are inherent in all government enterprise.”
Capitalists: Informed Humanitarians
When free-market proponents push back on government spending initiatives like the recent internet access program, we are often accused of being “against” whatever that initiative is trying to achieve. In this case, people will probably say we are “against internet access.” Here Biden is trying to do something nice to improve the welfare of American citizens, and we just want to stop him, presumably because we are heartless souls who hate paying taxes and don’t care about other people’s well-being.
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
The fact is, free-market proponents do care about human welfare. In fact, it is precisely because we care that we are against government spending! The question is not whether to have government-funded initiatives or let people suffer, but whether to have the government or the market allocate resources.
A proper understanding of economics, we believe, leads to the conclusion that market allocations tend to be better for the well-being of everyone than government allocations. Thus, far from being an act of misanthropy, our opposition to government spending actually stems from the very concern for human welfare that the left erroneously thinks they have a monopoly on.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Clickhereto sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
All of the photos in this set were processed in May 1966 and were probably taken around that time. They all may be from Bermuda.
The first photo is of a lighthouse. A Google image search wasn't very helpful because Google thinks all lighthouses look the same. However, once I figured out these were taken in Bermuda, it was pretty easy to figure out that it was St. David's Island Lighthouse in St. George.
processed May 1966 - St. David's Island Lighthouse
A more recent photo found on the internet from June 2010
I'm not sure what the next photo is supposed to be. It appears to be a close up of a tree or hedge. I thought maybe it was an attempt to photograph a bird or something inside but if so, I don't see it.
processed May 1966
The next photo features The Bank of Butterfield Building in King's Square in St. George. This building was constructed in 1776 and originall used used by British troops as a mess hall during the American Revolutionary War.
processed May 1966 - The Bank of Butterfield Building, King's Square, St. George
A more recent photo reveals not much has changed:
The final photo looks like an outdoor cafe or picnic area. You can see it is by the water and this was likely taken in Bermuda also.
processed May 1966
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
AC's Tech Amiga was a more technically oriented spin-off of Amazing Computing, both of which were dedicated to the Amiga. The May 1992 issue of AC's Tech Amiga includes:
Editorial - The editor notes the demise of a competing publication and how it isn't all good news.
Programming the Amiga in Assembly Language, Part 2 - This second part on assembly language programming concentrates on the use of macros.
Amiga Voice Recognition - An in-depth analysis of computerized voice recognition with some specific code examples for the Amiga.
Table of Contents from the May 1992 issue of AC's Tech Amiga
Implementing an ARexx Interface in Your C/Program, Part 2 - Using ARexx, Amiga's scripting language, with C programs.
Integrated Function Systems for Amiga Computer Graphics - Using mathematics and the concept of "self-similarity" to create graphics. Sounds kind of like fractals to me.
Keyboard I/O from Amiga Windows - Programming techniques of capturing keyboard input in windows.
Copper Programming - Using Copper, one of the Amiga's graphics coprocessors, to create impressive graphics.
Back cover of the May 1992 issue of AC's Tech Amiga
While perhaps not exactly impartial, Nintendo Power was the go-to magazine for all things Nintendo. Early 1991 was really peak NES. The Super Famicom had already been released in Japan but it would be August before the Super NES would arrive in the U.S. Coverage was all NES and Game Boy except for a few previews. The January 1991 issue includes:
Features
Mega Man III - A strategy guide for the latest Mega Man game.
The Immortal - A strategy guide for this isometric action/adventure game from Electronic Arts. I really wanted this game but when I got it, it did not work correctly with my TV for some reason (wavy picture) so it ended up being returned. I don't think later reviews were very good so maybe I dodged a bullet.
Deja Vu - Strategy guide for this point and click murder mystery. You shouldn't really use these guides unless you are completely stuck because they basically ruin the game. Especially this kind of game.
Video Updates
Now Playing - A brief look at recent releases including Conquest of the Crystal Palace, Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, Silver Surfer, The Adventure or Rad Gravity, Werewolf and Arch Rivals.
Pak Watch - Previews of soon to be released games, including G.I. Joe, Metal Storm, Base Wars, Monopoly, Zombie Nation, Uninvited, Galaxy 5000, and Mini-Putt. Plus a look at the first Super Famicom games, Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings.
Game Boy
Dragon's Lair - Dragon's Lair turned into a platform game.
Mercenary Force - Medieval Japanese squad based combat on the Game Boy.
Burai Fighter Deluxe - A sci-fi shoot-em-up.
Table of Contents from the January 1991 issue of Nintendo Power
Player's Forum
Player's Pulse - Readers write in about Tetris and playing the Game Boy around the world.
NES Achievers - High scores and achievements in Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Captain Skyhawk, Crystalis, Final Fantasy, The Mafat Conspiracy, Ninja Gaiden II, Pinbot, Rescue Rangers, Revenge of the Gator, Rock 'N Ball, Rollerball, Snake's Revenge, Solstice, Stealth ATF, Tetris, Tombs & Treasure, and Wall Street Kid.
Tips from the Pros
Classified Information - Tips, tricks and cheats for Castlevania II, Heavy Shreddin', Final Fantasy, Dungeon Magic, Dragon Spirit, Alien Asylum, Image Fight, Skate or Die 2, Swords and Serpents, and Thunderbirds.
Howard & Nester - A monthly comic from Nintendo Power. Not sure why this is in the 'Tips From the Pros' section but that's where they have it.
Special Reports
Today's Technology - A look at some of the upgrade hardware for the NES that was included in game paks (cartridges). These include extra RAM, MMCs (Memory Management Controllers) that added various capabilities. MMC1 = used in many games, allowed scrolling. MMC2 = used in Punch-Out!!. MMC3 = added the ability for split screen scrolling and scrolling at an ange and is used in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Play Action Football. MMC5 = improved battery backup, better color definition, partial screen scrolling, increased max cart size; used in Castlevania III among others.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System - A look at a keyboard and cartridge combo for the NES that teaches you how to play the piano.
The Info Zone
Player's Poll - Answer a few questions for a chance to win various prizes.
Celebrity Profile - A feature on New Kids on the Block and their gaming habits.
Back cover of the January 1991 issue of Nintendo Power
State Farmannouncedlast week it will no longer accept homeowner insurance applications inCalifornia, where it has long been a leading insurance provider.
Ina press release, America’s largest property insurance company cited various reasons for its decision, including the high costs of doing business in California, macroeconomic factors such as inflation, and increased catastrophe exposure.
Media seized on this last item to declare the official arrival of the climate apocalypse.
“Climate shocks are making parts of America uninsurable,” The New York Timesobservedfollowing State Farm’s announcement.
While climate change might be in the zeitgeist, there are better explanations for State Farm’s exit.
Though State Farm said nothing about climate change in its press release, there’s no question that California has struggled mightily with wildfires in recent years.Data collected by Policygeniusshow California experiences more wildfires than any other U.S. state (9,280 in 2021) and the most acreage burned (2.2 million acres).
Worse, California’s wildfires tend to be the most destructive. The Golden State suffered $14 billion in insured wildfire losses in 2017, the most in history. The worst years for other states don't even come close: The next closest is Texas, which suffered $530 million in insured wildfire losses in 2011, followed by Colorado ($450 million in 2012) andArizona ($120 million in 2002).
Many have seized on California’s struggles with wildfires to perpetuate the myth that wildfires are at historic highs in the United States—they are not—because of climate change. The truth is wildfires are not a serious problem in most parts of the U.S., and it’s not because the climate change gods are fickle, but because these states practice better land management.
In a 2020ProPublicaarticle, journalist Elizabeth Weilpointed outthat California officials have turned the state into a tinderbox through years of fire suppression.
“The pattern is a form of insanity,” Weil wrote. “We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures.”
The New York TimesnotedCalifornia’s approach is a stark contrast to the Southeast, where “fire is widely accepted as a tool for land management” and millions of acres are allowed to burn each year.
Property rights also play a role. In Texas, 95% of the landis privately owned, which has resulted in better stewardship and fewer megafires. This is a stark contrast to California, whereroughly 48 million acres, nearly half the state’s land area, are owned by the federal government, which is so bad at land management that it managedto lose some 15 million acres of public land.
The authorities have shown they are far less competent than the indigenous tribes who managed the land far more effectively through prescribed fire.
“We should be empowering the people who know how to do this,” Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced, told theNew York Timesafter wildfires ravaged the state in 2020.
Privatizing these lands would be more effective than any federal climate policy — ever hear ofthe tragedy of the commons? — but government officials will never concede that their own mismanagement is to blame.
"The factors driving State Farm’s decision are beyond our control, including climate change," a statement from the California Department of Insurancesaid.
It’s a tempting fiction to believe, to be sure. But the truth is California’s own policies are to blame, and not just fire suppression.
I spoke to Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, who cited several policies that no doubt contributed to State Farm’s decision to stop issuing policies, including variousprice controlsthat prevent insurers from raising prices to meet surging costs without the written approval of the California Department of Insurance.
“California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurers’ rates to be based upon actual reinsurance costs,” Frazier said. “California’s regulations employ a legal fiction that each insurer uses its own capital to serve customers. As reinsurance costs go up, insurers cannot have their rates reflect those higher costs.”
Many will cling to the theory that climate change is the real culprit. Those who favor this theory should be asked why California is particularly prone to the externalities of climate change.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
All of the photos in this set appear to have been taken in the late 1950s. The first is a shot of a church, the second is a cat named "Toasty", the third...well, I don't know exactly what they are doing in the third picture there but it must be Christmas because the kid is wearing a candy cane pinned to his jacket. The final photo features a wedding cake. Label's below are written here as they appear on the slides themselves.
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 1-7-57
Loveaster's "Toasty", 1-5-57
Dio Osbourne, Lillian Shannon, Brian Harrison
Donna's Wedding Cake
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
Info covered various Commodore computers throughout its life, mostly the Commodore 64 and Amiga. By 1991 it was covering exclusively the Amiga. Though not as popular as some of the larger publications, it was fairly widely distributed and had the novelty of being produced on Commodore equipment. The September/October 1991 issue includes:
Focus
Profile - An interview with Fred Wagner, an "Artist-in-Residence" at a school in Rochester who uses his Amiga 1000 for storytelling.
DTP - Comparing the desktop publishing experience on the Amiga, Macintosh and PC.
Networking - Part 2 in a series on networking on the Amiga. This part includes a look at some of the products available, including TCP/IP software for $199, an ethernet board for $349, and much more.
The Amiga Pro
Hardware - A detailed look at the CDTV.
CDTV
Productivity - A review of ASDG's Art Department Professional from a desktop publishing point of view.
.info technical support - How multitasking works on the Amiga, the slowness of the 68000 multiply and divide instructions, and writing scripts in AmigaDOS.
Table of Contents from the September/October 1991 issue of .info
Departments
.info Monitor - The editor and publisher respond to comments about the CDTV.
Reader Mail - More letters from readers about the CDTV.
New Products - A look at new products including the Miracle Piano Teaching System, Map Master for Lightwave and Imagine, PowerPacker Professional, StudyWare for the SAT, the AirMouse, Cinnamon Toast Fonts, CDROM-FS, Doug's Color Commander, and more.
News & Views - Commodore donates Amiga systems to the Smithonian, a look at the Summer CES, and more.
.info Update - Blue Ribbon SoundWorks expands their upgrade policy for Bar & Pipes, Microft Software releases VidGen 2.0, Gramma Software updates products to work with AmigaDOS 2.0, and more.
Back cover of the September/October 1991 issue of .info
