Ahh fond and not so fond memories.
I suppose as PCW are gone now, there is no harm in saying this…
I used to do the repo work for PCW in the 90's. Little known to PCW, the repo work was meant to be done by some big repo house in London. They could not cope with meeting the workload, so farmed out the work to a little repo house in Bucks where I used to work the night shift on my own.
I remember a motorbike courier arriving about 8-9 pm, dropping off a load of SyQest cartridges, with Pagemaker files and Type 1 fonts, along with a bunch of slides and pictures to scan and drop in. I had to scan all the pictures and replace the placeholders in the Pagemager files with the nice hi-res ones, then print the lot out to a film image setter. This was just the real content, not the many, many pages of ads, thank God.
Mr. Kewney, I seem to remember the odd late night phone call from the repo house in London phoning me up and screaming at me not to run the NewsPrint section as they just got a new version. In those days all we had was an ISDN link, so you can imagine I was ecstatic, especially if I had already printed and developed the film!
The worst part was being given a tiny picture ripped out of another magazine, and being expected to blow it up to half A4. As some of you may know, a printed image in a magazine or paper is made up of loads of different coloured dots (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). The problem is that when you scan it in and them print it out again, you’re prone to get interesting Newton ring effects. Also, the text on the back of the image could bleed through. On occasion, I my boss would say that he got a phone call from the London repo house complaining that PCW had chewed them out because of a crap looking image in the magazine, every time it was down to one of these pictures. Normally, we just said that they were welcome to try and do better, to their credit, they did normally come back and say fair enough, it was crap to begin with.
Still, that said, for the most part I enjoyed it, and I did enjoy being able to read PCW before it was available in the shops and without those ads.
And I remember Inmos. It sounded really cool, I think Atari launched a computer called the Perihelion that used Inmos transputers. Sadly too expensive for the average person, though I think they did sell a few to some universities.
Anyway I’ve made this post far too big. RIP PCW and keep to your deadlines Mr. Kewny :)