Today we offer the first set of disks from the Page/Zimmerman collection. A bit of history and reminiscing...
Early on I gravitated towards the demo and music scene. I played some games, but was more interested in seeing the new graphics, logos, songs, and general commodore goodness. Alot of the bbs's I called were devoted to those types of programs, so I started amassing a collection. One of the bbs's I was on at the time was Electron (an NTSC demo group) HQ. I got to know them a bit from my trading of demos and music, and chatted with them about doing some mail trading. They put me in touch with one of their contacts who was a collector as well. His handle was Rundy, and his name was George Page.I mail traded with George every couple of months or so, starting out sending 5 1/4 floppies, then later after I'd gotten a 1581 drive, multiple 1581's of software. George was also trading partners with some guys in Europe. I'd also traded a bit locally and mail traded as well, so I'd have some stuff he didn't already have. I'd call him on some sunday evenings while I was at college and we'd chat about what was new from the bbs's and from the mail, and kinda catch up on other commodore related news. This went on for a number of years, then as all things do it came to an end. I dropped out of college, moved away, and George was kind of quitting the scene as well. Many of the bbs's had dried up with the new internet connectivity, and mail trading became a moot point when you could transfer data at such high speeds.
Time warp to the early 2000's, I see Bo Zimmerman's site. He talked about driving out to Colorado to purchase a collection from a legendary collector. The guy with the collection was named George Page. I knew George was collecting alot of obscure commodore equipment, trying to get every version of every drive or commodore hardware that was out there. Well apparently he had some really rare hardware pieces that Bo wanted, and George said he'd sell them to him, but if he got those he had to take it all. The whole story is at Bo's website: http://zimmers.net/cbmpics/2002fiasco/fiasco.html. Anyways, after I was reading this I got very excited. I knew that George being the collector he was had to have had a massive collection that remained untapped. In my estimation probably one of the larger collections in existence. Here is a pic of the disk boxes that came with the collection that Bo bought: http://zimmers.net/cbmpics/2002fiasco/diskboxes.gif. I then reached out to Bo, seeing if there was any way we could get access to those disks and start the arcvhiving process. Bo and I have been in contact for several years on and off, but were never able to iron out all the details.
Well last year we were able to finally work it out. Bo has sent me 3 large boxes of disks and I've been steadily working on them. After receiving the 2nd box I emailed Bo and asked if there were more. He says alot more. So I'm going to be archiving on these for the forseable future. What's the advantage of looking through a large collection like this you might ask. Most of these disks were how they were origianlly copied, or downloaded. So they keep intact all the directory information that was setup with the disks, many of these disks were a product of the HQ bbs he was affiliated with, and many could have rarer US releases that may not be on the internet currently.
It has been my goal to get these disks archived so the data would not be lost. I hope this gives a little history and perspective on why I think this is one of the largest Commodore scene collections to be found and archived.