[Coco] Rainbow Magazine

Andrew keeper63 at cox.net
Sun Jun 8 15:25:34 EDT 2008


List members: Please help me where my memory is fading...

Guys,

Please review the archive of this mailing list - I can't point you to 
when the last discussion on this was, but it was earlier this year:

   http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/

As far as I remember, the state of the Rainbow Magazine scanning is 
still in limbo. Lonnie had given his blessing to have the magazine 
scanned, then re-published on DVD, so long as he received a royalty for 
each issue (it was something absurdly low for what we would have 
gotten). An individual (I can't remember his name, I think he is still 
active here) was the "liason" and scanner of the magazines. Many people 
donated magazines and he had access to a nice scanner and a method to 
separate the pages from the spine of the magazine (thus rendering them 
into individual pages and destroying the issues), so that the pages 
would go flat into the scanner for quality scans. They were scanned, 
cleaned up, ocr'ed (IIRC - for searchability), then converted to DejaVue 
format (an open-source PDF-like document publishing format). The project 
was going well.

Then Lonnie died.

His estate had little to no clue about all of this. As far as I know, 
they aren't talking to us about anything. I am imagining that this may 
all be still going through probate, although his death has been a while 
back now (or - it sadly seems that way).

The individual doing the scanning couldn't continue, and I don't 
remember where it was left. There was discussion about continuing the 
scanning by another individual, transferring the whole kit-n-kaboodle, 
but I think this was even in question, as to how the contract between 
Lonnie and the guy was written - it didn't seem that it could be 
transferred, and the estate (and/or its lawyers) didn't want to talk to 
us about it...

It's in limbo - and we don't want to jepardize its status, because you 
can bet that if we did go ahead anyhow, that same estate would 
"suddenly" figure it out and get greedy and drag us into court over 
20-30 year old magazines.

I would like an update on all of this as well. I would like an answer 
out of the estate.

I worry that a lot was lost with Lonnie's passing - not just this 
contract and all the effort behind the scanning - but also stuff we will 
never see and was likely tossed in the trash (ie, history of Falsoft and 
the Rainbow, any of Lonnies notes and other personal CoCo history, etc).

I hate being on the "long tail" of things...

-- Andrew L. Ayers, Glendale, Arizona



More information about the Coco mailing list