Wilby
Wilby was a special diskmag: Each issue was only about 4 kbytes in size. And it wasn't a text-only magazine. No, it featured a graphical interface inside these 4 kbytes. What sounds like a weird idea has a special charme to it: The authors are forced to write in a very concise style and make their point clear with only a few sentences. Wilby showed that it's possible to make interesting articles without writing many words. Most of the articles occupied just a page each.
The main editor was Spock of Wild Bits from Spain. He also coded the engine of the first three issues and the sixth issue. Issues 4 and 5 were coded by Ritz of Revolution. Six issues were released in the years 1999-2001. All of them work on modern PCs without an emulator although they are DOS-based. They can be downloaded from scene.org. About 800 people have downloaded them until now.
Wilby #1
Wilby #1 is from October 1999. It is sized 8 pages. The first page is the editorial, then some news and articles about the scene follow. There are the results of a survey on what platform is the best for scene activities, DOS won. 1999 was the time of transition to Windows in the scene, but most of the 9 voters that participated in the Wilby survey/charts were rather conservative in this respect. Then there are charts. There are two categories: most popular scener and most popular group. These two categories have been used in all of the Wilby issues that have had charts in them. On the final page the voters are listed.
Wilby #2
Wilby #2 (November 1999) is 11 pages. There is a coding article by Seven. He lists some Assembler commands that take less bytes than some other Assembler commands which have approximately the same effect. In an article, FatCrazer poses the question if the scene is getting younger all the time. He shows two examples of well-known sceners who, at the time of writing, were younger than 20. Well, time has shown the scene hasn't become younger, it has become older, as the same people stayed active and only a few youngsters joined it. In another article TAD shows how Windows 9x can be configured to boot in MS-DOS mode. There are the charts again, and there are two poll questions on the readers' opinion on Wilby and on the use of MP3s in demos.
Wilby #3
The December 1999 issue features an article by Seven on optimizing loops. He shows how to save one byte per loop by using the pointer as the counter. In another article, TAD demonstrates how hexadecimal values can be converted to ASCII characters. There's a reply article on FatCrazer's article from the previous issue, and some other texts. There are also the charts and the polls, the second question of which has been exchanged by a question about party coding.
Wilby #4
Wilby #4 was released in January 2000. It's exactly 4096 bytes. The new engine coded by Ritz of Revolution features a background animation and horizontal smooth scrolling. On 10 pages, there are articles about the ZX spectrum scene, size optimizing in Asm (by Seven), allocating bytes (by TAD) and fractal generation (by iq). The second poll question this time is about Internet at parties.
Wilby #5
Released in March 2000 and again having exactly 4096 bytes, Wilby #5 features 9 pages of articles. There are two articles about size optimizing in Assembler, by Metalbrain and Seven respectively. The poll question is about whether there's a dominating group in the scene. Most voters say no.
Wilby #6
Wilby #6 was released a year later, in April 2001. It was originally made for the Xuventude Galicia Net Party 2001 4 kb intro compo. Its interface differs greatly from the previous issues. There's a menu, and the selected article is displayed on the same screen as a scroll text. This makes reading a bit more difficult. There are just three articles, dealing with the closing of the Hornet archive, demodesign and newbies in the scene. This issue got rather poor feedback.