In the Autumn of 1996 the first automotive
digital publication was released. It was released
on CD-ROM, the only digital publishing
format available at the time. It's title was Alfa
Romeo: View from the Mouth of the Dragon. It
was the developed by S. Scott Callan, Tom Ellis
and Kip Crosby.
Scott had been producing automotive TV in
the early 1990s. Tom is an old mainframe
programmer. Kip as editor. They came
together in 1994 to pioneer e-publishing.
While doing development for a new TV series
in association with Ferrari, Ital, Pinin, Alfa,
Mercedes, a concept came to Scott over the
classic cocktail napkin: to blend the depth of a
book, with the sound, film and animation of
broadcast, on the then new medium of CD-
ROM. This concept was further bolstered by
the thought that his four year old son would be
getting his information and entertainment from
the burgeoning world of digital media.
Initially no computer programmers took him
seriously, because he didn't have a clue about
programming and what would be required to
produce such a publication. With over thirty
years in all forms of media, from print art
direction to afore mentioned tv production, he
continued to frame the concept and write a
manuscript on the early auto industry with a
focus of the against all odds story of Alfa. This
was bolstered by the fact that his friend at Alfa,
Cornelis Verwiej, head of media at Arese, when
asked if he'd participate with archive material
in 1993, replied, "Scott, I have no idea what the
hell you're talking about, but you can have
what you need."
Shortly thereafter Scott was introduced to
Tom, whose response over after dinner brandies
was, “Well you obviously don’t know anything
about computers or programming, but that’s a
good thing. One of the problems with
programmers is they’re more interested in
programming something to impress their peers
than programming something the public may
find entertaining to use. You think
perpendicular to established practice. You
think like a TV producer. And that’s what a
project like this needs.”
Shortly thereafter Scott was introduced to
Tom, whose response over after dinner brandies
was, “Well you obviously don’t know anything
about computers or programming, but that’s a
good thing. One of the problems with
programmers is they’re more interested in
programming something to impress their peers
than programming something the public may
find entertaining to use. You think
perpendicular to established practice. You
think like a TV producer. And that’s what a
project like this needs.”
So the pioneering of e-publishing began. An
entirely new form of literature had to be
innovated. Scott took the traditional linear plot
of print of broadcast and transformed it into a
multi-threaded, yet sequential, plot structure.
Remember, you had to navigate through it. Kip
turned it to prose. Entirely new methods of
digital animation were developed to create a
reader's environment that visually worked like
a car guy's mind works when reading a book.
Engineering text explanations were designed
and programmed so the engines were
'assembled' in timed animations next to the text
being read. A method for taking 24 frame a
second film, with sound, directly to digital,
without a video step was developed. Computers
hated 30 frame a second video at this time in
the mid 1990s. This was possible because, as a
producer, Scott had colleted archive film, you
could still get it then, of races, GPs, the Targa,
the Mille, from the twenties and thirties. And
for those familiar with computers, it was all
done on Windows 3.1, before W95 was
released!
To prove it intuitively worked for car guys,
and gals, after three years of development the
board of the Blackhwak museum was brought
together at a computer school. They were told it
worked just like a book, page turns and all.
After an hour and a half of 'look what's here,"
comments the director of the museum turned
to his assistant and said, "Hey, wait a minute,
I'm computer illiterate!" Not so, it seemed.
ARCD, as it has been nicknamed, was the
second e-book published, Microsoft beat it by a
month or so with a book on architecture. It was
the second 800 X 600 format CD, Disney's Lion
King came out the week before.
James Elliott for Classics and Sports Cars
wrote in September, 1997 : "Make no
mistake, this hi-tech CD-ROM is actually a
book. Alfa Romeo: View from the Mouth of the
Dragon comes from the States and traces the
history of Alfa from its Darracq roots and
through all the great characters such as Ferrari,
Jano and Merosi. To use the book you need a
PC running Windows and-be warned-it does
take a little getting used to reading a book on a
computer screen. On the plus side S Scott
Callan and Kip Crosby's book is an absorbing
read and the big advantages of all this
technology are motion sequences and subfiles
on the more important figures. An excellent
500-page 'living archive' as fascinating as it is
encyclopaedic."
The fate of early digital media finally caught
up with the Alfa CD. Though it was so stable it
operated on all Windows systems from 3.1 all
the way through XP. With the retirement of XP
it has become that new generation of legacy
digital media. A few have come up for sale at
automobilia auctions, and some have changed
hands in the collector market for impressive
prices on the internet.
In the spirit of automobilia collecting we are
offering a very limited number of display art
pieces of the CD..
As you can see in the image above, each
numbered and dated piece will have two CDs
mounted in the frame. One will be a sealed
edition. The other will be an opened edition.
The frame will be open-face in construction.
This will allow you to remove and examine the
Operating Instructions. Enabling you to review
the operation of CD’s of the period, when
having a requirement for 80Meg of free space
was a big deal! It will also allow you to take out
the CD and read it if you still have an XP
machine on the network, like I do.
Only 35 pieces will be produced starting
March 2019. They are $500. plus S&H.
Obscurum
A Rare Collectable
The first automotive digital publication
The Autoweek ad art...with laurel leaves on old dirt road
