1st July 2003I wonder how many of your readers remember me? Matthew Ford, contributor of the autostereogram, or Magic Eye, generator (EUG #21) and the openers for EUGs #18 and #19. No? Well, maybe you remember my brother, Dominic Ford then? He produced Shipwrecked, Shipwrecked 2 and a series of programming articles. They still amaze me when I see how much can be crammed into 12K or RAM on a Mode 2 game (the other 20K being taken up by the screen). These days a one-page Word document can occupy several times the RAM capacity of an Electron because there's no longer an incentive to be 'clever' with memory allocation.
Sadly, although I remain a proud Electron owner, I haven't used it much since those early contributions back in 1995 before I went off to University. I let my subscription lapse some time in the middle of the Gus Donnachaidh era after getting rather bored with the pile of irrelevant articles waiting to be read each time I came home. Nowadays the word "electron" tends to conjure up images of a subatomic particle rather than a computer, since that's the area in which I now work.
Recently though I found and installed the ElectrEm emulator on my Linux PC and began catching up on all the EUG issues I'd missed. Pretty good they are too! Our Editor must have spent ages typing up all those articles and instruction manuals. Something that struck me though is none of the issues in the (otherwise excellent) archive of EUG discs at www.8bs.com have dates. These would be interesting to know, since there are no dates on most of the welcome pages or menus within the discs.
Actually, returning to the autostereogram project, I believe I have several more Electron autostereograms that I never got around to submitting (perhaps due to my discs not being returned and my earlier submissions not being included in full, etc). I also worked out an algorithm for generating 'patterned' autostereograms (possibly even in colour), more like the ones published commercially. My Electron ones used random pixels, which made them harder for your eyes to latch onto. I don't think I ever finished this project though.
How long has it been since the last issue (EUG #62) came out?
Matthew Ford
Well, this is in fact currently the 'last' EUG to come out, after a break of over a year. EUG #62 was the last disc to be physically distributed to the readership and came out on 1st January 2002. There will be more EUGs in the future too, basically because there are a lot of public domain programs and unused submissions cluttering up EUG HQ which are handily 'filed' when put onto an EUG disc.
Although the issue dates of each EUG are not mentioned on the discs themselves, the information is there in text form. Inside the downloaded '.zip' archive that you have got from 8BS there should be a Notepad file which details the contents of each disc very briefly. In the very top left hand corner of each is the issue number and the date it was originally released. This information is, as you say, quite important and it will be prominently displayed when the EUG part of the Acorn Electron Haven web site is finalised. See the EUG Returns column.
If you've ploughed through all the EUGs by now you'll notice I was 'doing an Alan Partridge' over The Gus Administration in The Very Last Straw article in EUG #62. There probably isn't much more to be said than that if he only kept a few of your discs then you got off quite lightly. Before I get accused of "Gus slagging" again though, let me repeat that without Gus EUG would have died a long time ago so we all have every reason to thank him for its continued existence.
Oh, and needless to say, if that autostereogram project is looking for a good home then look no further than EUG #64...
