Looking Ahead

Daniel K. Appelquist

Hi. I'm Dan Appelquist, and I have been known to sleep all day. I've also produced, with a little help from my friends, the magazine you're currently reading. A couple of years ago, when I was freshmanning in computer science, I had an idea that it would be kind of neat to set up a literary magazine and distribute it around campus. There was certainly a need for such a magazine, but the idea kind of fizzled. There was really no way for a freshman to produce a magazine and distribute it. The costs were simply too prohibitively high.

The issue of a magazine came up again several months ago when I was asked to help produce a fanzine for a local science fiction club. The problem of cost still cropped up. The club fizzled out before anything developed with that, but the cost still would have been too high.

Shortly after this, I responded to the call for subscriptions for Jim McCabe's Athene (see ad at the end of this issue.) I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the format I was looking for. With the computing resources available to me as a student at Carnegie Mellon, I could produce a professionally typeset magazine electronically with almost no cost to myself, and then distribute the magazine, again electronically, over the various nets, again at no cost to myself.

Three weeks after I sent out a call for subscriptions and submissions to Quanta, we already had over 200 subscriptions, including, to my surprise and delight, subscriptions from the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, and Belgium (if I've missed some, please excuse me, it's not trivial to decode the various sorts of mail paths.) We also had enough submissions to produce at least one issue of real quality. I'm very excited about the material in this issue, and fortunately there's plenty more where that came from.

In that context, I'd like to thank Peter David for donating our only article this issue. In future issues I'd like to include more articles, but if you're thinking of submitting an article, please don't write it newsnet style. We got a few article submissions that were basically newsgroup posts. We're looking for a bit more professionalism than this.

Looking ahead, as the title of this rather hastily written article would suggest, I see the arena of electronically distributed magazines such as Quanta expanding greatly. For now, here's one issue of Quanta. It comes after much blood, sweat, tears and wrestling with unruly typesetting programs. Enjoy.

-Dan A.