Disk magazines can generally fall into two categories: addendums of professionally published magazines offering code, art, music, software and examples used in or based on articles in the paper versions of the magazines.
User group disks generally may include:
- News, often written by the "Editor" of a given group
- Art (digital paintings, 3D renderings, photographic scans, image conversions from other computer platforms)
- Animations (2D, 3D)
- Notable software shareware tools and utilities
- Music and sound f/x
And, a lot of the disks were often focused on a single topic (e.g. one of the bullet points above) but sometimes were a "grab bag" of miscellaneous things.
In any case, last night I was going through another pile of disks and came across several from the NCA User Group of Washington D.C. I'd gone through these back in 2018 but I never really kept track of what I was doing.
It goes without saying that as far as I can tell, a vast majority of these disks have never been preserved or made available during the internet age in any shape or form. The only exception seemingly is the Memphis Amiga Group [update: sadly the site is now offline as of 2024], which has done an excellent job preserving their disks and newsletters. Whatever some of us have stacked in cardboard boxes is the only proof they ever existed at all.
I've had some ideas around a way this could change, but that's a topic for another day.
In any case, I'm spelunking these disks primarily looking for cool art images, and occasionally useful OS 1.3 applications I've not seen or heard of before.
I grabbed a disk labeled "Hold & Modify" and popped it in my A1000. I see several file names and after a quick scan of the included README file, I fire up WShell and navigate to DF0. In the root of the disk is a program called "showham". I also see a file named, "Spock.ham".
Thus, I type
Code: Select all
showham spock.ham- This impressive scan of a piece of artwork, presumably from some magazine from the 1980s, with Spock in glorious 4096 color HAM mode.
Impressed, I scan the other file names and go down the list. With slight hesitance, I see:
Blonde.ham
Blonde2.ham
Candy.ham
and so on...
I went for the "candy ham"
- Needless to say, Candy is quite impressive when not cropped by my Amiga's impressive multi-tasking capabilities and dragging down the screen. Also, note the date on the screen: August 1986. This file was created and shared when Amiga was only 1 year old! To have seen this image back in 1986 when I was completely absorbed by my Commodore 64 would have broken my brain.
Out of my fairly large collection of disks I've been pulling notable "winners" like this one to the side to ponder next steps. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks they're worth saving and remembering.
_+_+_+_+_
Do you have any North American-based User Group disks you'd like to share? My collection currently includes disks from the following (none of which are close to complete):
User Groups
Sacramento Amiga Computer Club
NCA User Group, Washington D.C.
Memphis Amiga Group
Amiga Users of Calgary
AMAZ - Amiga Arizona
dbace - Daytona Beach Amiga Computer Enthusiasts
Disk Mags - via Paper Magazine
AmigaWorld Tool Chest (stacks)
Amazing Computing "Amicus"
Compute's Amiga Resource Disk
Amiga Animation
Disk Mags - via Individuals/Companies
Antics
Best of Amiga
AMnews
Jumpdisk
Public Domain Collections
Fred Fish
DevWare
Zipperware
CP Productions
Amuse (seems to be mainly games/entertainment)
^ this list is a work in progress...
