A sad (but possibly understandable) habit of (computing) folks is to search for their own name in search engines – primarily Google these days. The main point is to see how far down the list one appears, but also because it’s interesting to see exactly what pages there are. Guess where this is going…

So WAAAAAYYYYY down the Google list (like page 18), there’s a page or two from the Your Sinclair archives. I was a religious reader of Your Sinclair every month, as I played various games on my ZX81 and subsequent Spectrum +2 (with a whole 128k of memory), indeed I wrote in to YS Adventures from time to time – well, twice to be exact; May 1989,

and July 1989.

Ah, a tender 15 year old, back in the days when I had time to write to magazines!

Nearly all the results are nothing to do with me – I’m hardly the only “James Handley” in the world after all, but the YS stuff was a shock, as I’d forgotten all about it, and was hardly expecting it to be online! There’s loads of genealogy stuff, and one or two hits from processings and the like. It’s a little disappointing how far down eutony comes, but nevermind.

A far more rewarding venture, at least in turns of number of hits, is to do the same in the Google Groups archive. I was a significant user of usenet in my college years, indeed I just found a post where I gave my full home address and phone number in my signature! Those were more innocent days, I guess. Before usenet (at least in my personal history) was fidonet which was fab too, and I regularly posted on there, but I’m not sure if Google groups also grabs fidonet. I’ll link if I find any particularly interesting or amusing usenet posts…