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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal

6.2.2 Electronic text

The earliest e-journals produced can be described as electronic text only. These were journals that were restricted in their formatting to 7-bit ASCII (128 characters in all). Because of this, only very restricted formatting was possible, with only character-based graphics. These journals were (and still are) distributed by automated mailing list software, or stored on ftp, gopher or Web servers for retrieval.

Such journals had the advantage that they were directly searchable and had very low bandwidth requirements (and entire issue might be less than 100K in size). A number of these publications, typical of pre-Web e-journals, still survive today (although they may have added other facilities in the meantime). A good example is the Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS-R) which first appeared in 1990. It is distributed via the PACS-L mailing list (to join, send the following email message to listserv@listserv.uh.edu : SUBSCRIBE PACS-L First Name Last Name ), as well as being available on the Web at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pacsrev.html> .

Last modified: Monday, 11-Dec-2017 14:41:32 AEDT