Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 5
Today's Professionals Circuit Archive is much like other online fan fiction archives. It differs, however, in its longevity, and the fact that it straddled both print and online.
In the mid-1980s, print zines were already common in Star Trek and Blake's 7 fandom. But when stories were first being written for The Professionals in Britain, fanfic was mostly just shared from fan to fan. The "circuit" was thus a way of trading stories around without the formality of publishing them as zines.
The sixth issue of The Hatstand Express in 1985 was the first issue of that zine that that used the phrase "the circuit" -- up until then, fans used the terms, "the network," "the usual sources," and "making copies for people." At that time, fans relied on The Hatstand Index, a collection of 3X5 index cards, each with a known Pros story on it. In 1984, there were 300 cards in the Index.