1973 "Popular Computing" Newsletter by Fred Gruenberger???

[tejones777]

Fred Gruenberger was a well known computer pioneer, author and professor at California State University, Northridge. He wrote 28 books on computing, and started the Computer Science degree program at Northridge in the early 1970's.

In June 1973 he announced he was going to publish a monthly newsletter/magazine called "Popular Computing" and did so from 1973 until 1981, when he sold the name to McGraw Hill, publishers of "onComputing" who's name just wasn't working. Under its new name, it became the second highest circulation computer magazine by 1983.

Gruenberger's version was a monthly "newsletter" discussing computer science, algorithms, number theory, and interesting problems. Each issue was around 16-20 typewritten pages, and one description of it's content is here....

Gruenberger’s prime path | bit-player

The Problem: I can't find any copy of a single issue. There are descriptions and references, but no archive, nothing online. This seems strange.

Does anyone know if any copies of this early newsletter exists, or was it really lost to time? I've searched everywhere I can think of.

- Thomas.

 

[tejones777]

No responses, but I'm posting a short web page in hopes it may catch interested people searching google, and lead to some "leads."

https://techarc.com/gruenberger

I'm posting this hoping that someone, someday, may stubble upon this, and have more information, but this is a long shot.

 

[Al Kossow]

Dave Babcock, the person who ran CHM's 1620 restoration project, worked with Fred.
Try contacting him if he knows of anyone that has them.

 

[tejones777]

Thank you for the lead, Al! I'll try. I found Dave's linkedin profile, but can't seem to find any contact number or email. I found someone with his name who used to live in Simi Valley, and now is in Sacramento, and left a message for him (sounds like his wife's phone number, Debbie, though.) If you have any contact information for him, let me know. You could direct message me.

Fred Gruenberger mentioned someone named "John Scott" as the "art director" of the magazine. And I found an old letter where it almost seemed like John was the son (stepson?) of Fred and Audrey. He seems to now be living in the home that Fred lived in, when he was alive. I have reached out to him by telephone and email, but can't get a response. I suspect this is Fred's son, and only heir, and should know more.

But thanks for your lead!

- tj.

 

[bzotto]

This question piqued my interest so I followed the worldcat listing to the San Francisco public library holdings. I was passing through today so checked in person— Turns out they have the run from Jan 78 to April 81 (end of publication?) on microfiche, apparently photographed from their own original paper subscription (now gone). The microfiche reader setup is unfortunately a real bear— is there an issue or item in particular you are looking for?

In general it’s good to have stuff digitally of course, so I will go back soon with a USB drive and renegade-use their photo scanner to try to get good images of the whole sheets, but it would still be a lot of grunt work to turn that into normalized PDFs, and the quality is always crummy since it’s fiche. — if you land a better source for original paper that’s a better bet, but I’m happy to help out with sheet scans on this end, I live near the SFPL.

 

[tejones777]

This question piqued my interest so I followed the worldcat listing to the San Francisco public library holdings. I was passing through today so checked in person— Turns out they have the run from Jan 78 to April 81 (end of publication?) on microfiche, apparently photographed from their own original paper subscription (now gone). The microfiche reader setup is unfortunately a real bear— is there an issue or item in particular you are looking for?

In general it’s good to have stuff digitally of course, so I will go back soon with a USB drive and renegade-use their photo scanner to try to get good images of the whole sheets, but it would still be a lot of grunt work to turn that into normalized PDFs, and the quality is always crummy since it’s fiche. — if you land a better source for original paper that’s a better bet, but I’m happy to help out with sheet scans on this end, I live near the SFPL.

Interesting! That's 3.5 years out of the total 8-9 years, and the microfiche copies would be much better than trying to photograph a bound book. I'm not sure what a "renegade" is, but it does sound tedious to do anything with the over 600 pages of those 3.5 years of pages.

But until the copyright issue is settled, it may be best to avoid putting a bunch of work into digitizing issues.

I managed to make contact with John, Fred Gruenberger's son, who seems to be the heir of Fred's copyrights. I asked if he would consider donating rights to the public domain. I haven't heard back. I have sent emails to two different emails for Dave Babcock, who was not only close to Fred, but also was the associate editor of the magazine. I suspect Dave very well might have a copy which would make a higher-quality scan, but so far no response from him.

Google books may have a full set of this periodical, and I think they got it from University of California libraries. If this was made public domain, maybe they would release their already scanned copies.

Thanks to everyone who offered help and suggestions.

- Thomas.

 

[bzotto]

Google books may have a full set of this periodical, and I think they got it from University of California libraries. If this was made public domain, maybe they would release their already scanned copies.

I'm not seeing the UC libraries in the worldcat listing, but Stanford does seem to have the entire series on paper:

Popular computing in SearchWorks catalog

Stanford Libraries' official online search tool for books, media, journals, databases, government documents and more.

searchworks.stanford.edu

Probably bound into four volumes.

Washington State has the full run too. Anyway, there definitely exist complete preserved sets of this newsletter, so it's fortunately not lost to history-- even if it’s not yet trivial to access online.

 

[tejones777]

Good news! I think the problem is solved!

While I don't have complete confirmation from John Scott (son of Fred and Audrey Gruenberger) that he will release the copyright to the public domain (copyright expires in 2068 - 70 years after Fred's death), he suggests that may be the plan. Dave Babcock, who was close with Fred most of his live, and was the Associate Editor of the magazine, did reply to me late last night, and confirmed he has the entire collection, and it's already digitized into a searchable PDF files. He plans to donate it all to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, along with a bunch of Fred's old papers. Dave's hope is that they will make the PDFs available online, bit in my experience with CHM, that may take 6-12 months, as they have so much to do, and limited resources processing acquisitions and collections.

So nobody needs to do the arduous task of scanning the 2000+/- pages, we just should be patient. And if anyone has any contacts at CHM, maybe gently nudge them, but not too hard, as I bet they have a lot of high-priority projects.

Thanks to all for making this happen.

- Thomas.

 

[Al Kossow]

well, i'm a curator at CHM. if it goes into the public domain I can ask Dave for his scans and upload them to bitsavers