Hello and welcome to Florida Fandom on line. Florida Fandom has been around since 1976 as a Fanzine. We have tried to stay with the times as well as we could. When we started we would type up articles on an electric typewriter and then cut and paste them together using rubber cement, adding press type for the titles and pasting on original artwork. We would then take the paste up to a printer and have it printed off set. We would latter move to a computer to type it up, but we still had to cut it up and paste it together . Titles also could be created on the computer and instead of getting original artwork we would get photocopies of it. We also changed from off set printing to the much cheaper photo copies. (They had changed from a 25¢ for a one side fuzzy copy to about 7¢ for a two sided sharp copy). Computer got better and you could put together an entire issue on the computer - print it out and print up more copies or print them as you needed them. In 1996 we took the next step - going on line! Our first site was a free geocities site - when geocities were taken over by Yahoo we upgraded to our current site with our own domain name. Our hope was to created an ever growing site retaining the original departments from the zine. In October 2011 we went to the next step…Florida Fandom was 35 years old…we wanted something similar to our print issues which we had not done since the site was put up. So our 35 Anniversary issue came out in PDF format. You can still download a copy from this site, just go to the home page and click on PDF versions. You will find there along with our 35th Anniversary issue you will find two best of issues and our Revision Project versions of the some of the older issues. After doing our Anniversary issue and how much more we could do today, I wondered what it would have been like if we could have had the tech then that we do today, what they would have looked like. So for fun we redid the first issue using computer and a publishing program - for our guide lines we would change no text, no ads, artwork we would copy (or if we still had the original scan it) Logo and things we redid using what we had now, photos that we cut out of magazines we would go searching for on the net - if we couldn’t find the exact same one, we would use one similar. When we made any changes we only did what we felt we would have done originally if we had the tech to do it.
Back in 1976 Ruth and I wanted to start a Florida based fanzine being both for and about Florida Fans. Having been introduced to Fanzines by John Ellis (of Star Trek Federation of Fans) and having co-edited with John many of the STFF newszines, Tholian Registry, I was ready to start. After a few issues we realized the zine was for more than just fans in Florida, as we had readers and contributors from all over the country. Today we live in the mountains of East Tennessee, but the zine and site will stay Florida Fandom
