Popular Electronics magazine projects

[OldTechie]

Back in the early days of microcontrollers, Popular Electronics magazine and its successors published a number of construction projects, many of them containing microcontrollers such as the PIC, the 805x, and other types. They posted the code for these projects on the Gernsback BBS (Bulletin Board Systm), the dial-up modem predesessor of the internet.

I've been going back through some of my old issues, and have found a few projects that I'd like to build. However, I can't find any place on the web that contains an archive of the old BBS repository. I've searched through the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive web site with no luck. It appears that the contents of the BBS was migrated to the Popular Electronics FTP server, but the Archive didn't capture any of the contents, and there doesn't seem to be any reference as to where those files might have migrated.

Does anyone know of a site that might have those project files archived? If so, I (and probably a bunch of other folks) would certainly love to know about it.

Thanks for any help,
DaveM

 

[danadak]

This :

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

archive.org

Regards, Dana.

 

[OldTechie]

This :

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

archive.org

Regards, Dana.

Thanks for the reply, but no help at all, unless you can give a specific link to a file repository for the Gernsback FTP repository.
As I said in my original post, I had searched the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine for it, but the FTP site had not been crawled. The Archive has copies of many of the magazine issues, but not the microcontroller code files associated with the projects.

Cheers,
DaveM

 

[danadak]

Did not check but in handbooks at bottom of this page were there project
listings of code ? Just a thought

POPULAR ELECTRONICS: Consumer Electronics and Experimenter magazine

Popular Electronics Magazine: 1954 through 1982 Consumer electronics and experimenter publication. All issues available for reading or searching.

worldradiohistory.com

Might do some searches on this :

Gernsback Publications[edit]​

The title Popular Electronics was sold to Gernsback Publications and their Hands-On Electronics magazine was renamed to Popular Electronics in February 1989. This version was published until it was merged with Electronics Now to become Poptronics in January 2000. In late 2002 Gernsback Publications went out of business and the January 2003 Poptronics was the last issue.[30]

Gernsback.com

Publisher: Gernsback Publications | Open Library

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

openlibrary.org

Might contact their webmaster to see if they know anything....


Regards, Dana..

 

[augustinetez]

Does anyone know of a site that might have those project files archived? If so, I (and probably a bunch of other folks) would certainly love to know about it.

Pushing the proverbial uphill I'm afraid - I've also searched for the same over the years, some universities used to have a mirror but they have now all bitten the dust.

Techmonkeys also used to have a mirror as well but that seems to have disappeared too.

I have had some (very) limited success by searching for the actual file name of a project on a few occassions

 

[Ian Rogers]

https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm seem to be a lot here..

 

[upand_at_them]

C'mon guys...OP isn't looking for the magazine archive. He wants the source code for the microcontroller projects, which wouldn't have been printed in the magazine pages, it would have been available on the publisher's server. Which is now gone.

 

[OldTechie]

C'mon guys...OP isn't looking for the magazine archive. He wants the source code for the microcontroller projects, which wouldn't have been printed in the magazine pages, it would have been available on the publisher's server. Which is now gone.

Thanks for the response. That's exactly what I was asking for in the original post. I've exhausted my searching powers trying to find code for some of the articles, even trying to contact the authors of the articles, but finding good email addresses for them is a challenge. Some have since passed away since publishing their articles.
Sad to say, but it seems that another valuable asset (at least, to some of us) has gone away for good. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org), with their repository of scanned publications and crawled web sites is a VERY valuable asset to not only the technical community, but internet users in general. I am an annual monetary contributor to the organization, and I recommend that all who use it to financially support it as well.

Cheers to all who tried to help,
DaveM

 

[atferrari]

When starting to use my first PIC (16C57 times) I vaguely recall retrieving code (math routines) from an author publishing in EPE (UK) magazine. Used to be from a site where some pieces of his code were preserved. In my case, search was conducted using his name. That site was somewhat associated to that forum.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

When starting to use my first PIC (16C57 times) I vaguely recall retrieving code (math routines) from an author publishing in EPE (UK) magazine. Used to be from a site where some pieces of his code were preserved. In my case, search was conducted using his name. That site was somewhat associated to that forum.

That was probably John Becker, the editor of EPE Magazine, I helped him out a few times for which he sent me some EPE PCB's

Rather bizarrely, he didn't use MPASM (which was free), he used a shareware assembler which you were supposed to pay for, and wasn't compatible with MPASM - he wrote countless PIC projects and tutorials, the code for which is (presumably?) still available on the EPE website?.

I've just had a quick look, and it appears that only a few modern years are available, and require registering before downloading: https://www.epemag.com/lib/resource-files.html

I spoke to John about not using MPASM, and rather incredibly he'd never heard of it, and didn't know that MicroChip even provided one. The link above includes one for the TK3 (Toolkit 3) which includes the facility for converting John's original source code to MPASM compatible code.

 

[Pommie]

Are these complex projects?

I'm guessing that these go way back maybe to the 80s or 90s.

With today's much bigger (memory wise) and faster pic chips and C compiler it might be possible to rewrite the code without too much effort.

Is there a link available to the project in question?

Mike.

 

[augustinetez]

I'm just glad I downloaded all the legacy PIC codes from Alan Winstanley's EPEmag site before it went dark.

 

[Pommie]

The waybackmachine has an archive available. Not sure if it's any use,

www.epemag.com PE Practical Electronics hobby constructor magazine

Mike.

 

[atferrari]

That was probably John Becker, the editor of EPE Magazine, I helped him out a few times for which he sent me some EPE PCB's

Rather bizarrely, he didn't use MPASM (which was free), he used a shareware assembler which you were supposed to pay for, and wasn't compatible with MPASM - he wrote countless PIC projects and tutorials, the code for which is (presumably?) still available on the EPE website?.

I've just had a quick look, and it appears that only a few modern years are available, and require registering before downloading: https://www.epemag.com/lib/resource-files.html

I spoke to John about not using MPASM, and rather incredibly he'd never heard of it, and didn't know that MicroChip even provided one. The link above includes one for the TK3 (Toolkit 3) which includes the facility for converting John's original source code to MPASM compatible code.

Hi Nigel

While I recognize his name, the one I have in mind is someone whose name started with H and ended with y. (Sorry but my memory works like that quite frequently).
The forum Chatzone was the first I participated. Good recollections.

 

[atferrari]

Managed to remember the name: Peter Hemsley. While some of his code is in PIClist, there was another site working as a pure repository.

 

[Pommie]

Do you have a link to any of the project articles?

Mike.

 

[danadak]

PIClist, Microchip PIC

The PICList is a collection of people interested in the Microchip PIC processor.

www.piclist.com

Regards, Dana.

 

[augustinetez]

Managed to remember the name: Peter Hemsley. While some of his code is in PIClist, there was another site working as a pure repository.

Possibly Alan Winstanleys site that has now gone - epemag.net - think it was under the Code Snippets section.

 

[atferrari]

Possibly Alan Winstanleys site that has now gone - epemag.net - think it was under the Code Snippets section.

I also vaguely recall him suggesting to go somewhere, what I did, to retrieve his code.
Most probably where you say.

 

[OldTechie]

Do you have a link to any of the project articles?

Mike.

The projects that I'm interested in building are Popular Electronics and Poptronix magazine aricles. None of the ones I want to build were migrated to web pages (at least none that I've ben able to find). Searching by article titles and/or authors haven't turned up anything useful except downloads of the scanned magazines in the Internet Archive or the World Radio History sites, which I already have.

Neither of those repositories have any of the code related to the projects.
Thanks for all those who responded and offered suggestions.

Cheers,
DaveM