HISTORY SNIPPETS
Fed up after a failed online payment experience (why do I even
bother?!), I decided to start one of the ideas that's been in the
back of my mind lately about things to do in my Gopher hole.
I've got a lot of documents and photos that I think are historic
and interesting. I've done a little bit of uploading to the
Internet Archive, but the process of scanning and processing the
full content of many things is something I don't really have time
for. Also those that I have uploaded don't exactly get a huge wave
of views, which makes me wonder whether anyone actually cares.
The idea here is to solve both problems by only presenting various
"snippets" from different documents; just an image or two each
week. This way it's much less of a time sink than scanning in whole
magazines, books, or photo albums. Also by choosing a distinctly
different sort of item to upload each week, I hope it will be of
more general interest to anyone who likes 20th century history.
Though it will probably end up biased a bit towards technology
topics overall.
Also I won't be going out of my way for archive quality. For
example if something is difficult to lay on my scanner, I might
just photograph it with a camera, and maybe not even bother to fix
up any resulting distortion. If a few people actually tell me that
they like it, then I might feel like making some more effort with
this though.
For the first entry I've uploaded a couple of 1950s photographs of
Broome, Western Australia, that I scanned a while ago but haven't
put online until now. The dusty main street looks like a scene from
a lost time. The picture theatre is still there though, I found a
photo of it on Wikipedia and added that too.
We'll see how long I manage to keep this up. Also stay tuned for a
Gopher tribute site dedicated to a TV show that you've most likely
never heard of...
- The Free Thinker