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Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Is Trying To Save a Huge Storage Room of Manuals
martiniturbide writes: Remember Jason Scott of Textfiles.com, who wanted your AOL & Shovelware CDs earlier this year? Right now -- at this moment! -- he trying to save the manuals in a huge storage room that was going to be dumped. It is a big storage room and some of these manuals date back to the thirties. On Monday a team of volunteers helped him to pack some manuals to save them. Today he needs more volunteers at "2002 Bethel Road, Finksburg, MD, USA" to try to save them all. He is also accepting Paypal donations for the package material, transportation and storage room payment. You can also check his progress on his twitter account.
...of him wanting our AOL cds...
Good luck to him, but it's hard to say how valuable instruction manuals are if the machines they instruct in the use of no longer exist.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Seems like a planning problem. Storage is a drop in the bucket for a big org and there could be some goodwill for this, plus maaaaaybe some utility for anyone who supports legacy systems. Does LOC want them? Smithsonian? Some tech museum? Or one of the big tech companies?
they should see the value and just buy him and his site out. the whole process from hard copy to scanned Google Books would be so much easier.
Came on, help this guy save these manuals. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Normally we just have to do some lazy bum's research work for him so he can look good for his boss. Now you want us to do physical labour, too? Crazy.
Viva la /. Beta!
This reminded me of my search for a 1930s(I think) mashpriborintorg russian AVO meter schematic. It took weeks to find.
They're still usable because they're the easiest thing to test some kinds of transistors. and they're really hard to find.
and I got to collect like a hoard of other manuals for similar devices.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
I would help if I was anywhere close-by. I'm on the west coast so I can do nothing. :(
C'mon east coast! This is your chance to make reparations for hitchbot!
Perhaps it would have also seemed silly to try to save many the scrolls from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. No doubt many of those covered mundane details of ordinary life -- land transactions, farming methods, political deals. Certainly it would not be apparent to those who lived at that time that such trivia would hold any interest even a few years later, let alone centuries hence. But it does. And there is no way for us to know, in 2015, whether or not the manual for a Tektronix 545 oscilloscope (circa 1955) will be of interest to anyone in 2055. But we should know that if we let all the copies disappear, that the question will be moot: we'll have removed the possibility...and thus the possibility of whatever insight could be gained.
I stood in that room and held that manual in my hands yesterday. Then I put it in one of the many (many!) boxes headed for storage, against the day when it can be pulled out and scanned. Perhaps I'll be the last person to ever glance through it; or perhaps, sometime in the future, someone else will come across it and say a silent thank-you to those responsible for preserving it from oblivion.
This is part of our history -- encapsulated in voltage meters and PROM programmers, broadcast amplifiers and 68000 development boards. It is not disposable. It is not expendable. And so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to head over there and get back to work.
This is the guy who spent his time and mostly his own money to document the quickly-fading memory of Bulletin Board Systems in a documentary. I know because he came all the way to California and interviewed me and many others who were sysops back in the day. My board was very minor but he was gracious enough to travel to the small town where I now live to interview me. I have a great deal of respect for him and his efforts at preservation. Some day someone will be asked to preserve Jason's life and legacy and I hope they can apply the same zeal he brings to his efforts to their own. He's not curing cancer or landing a man on the moon, but somebody who takes the time to preserve the slightly less critical aspects of our tech history deserves support and credit. Good for him.
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Flawless or nearly-flawless books have to be found, then they have to be cut apart with precision paper-handling equipment to separate the pages from the spines while leaving the pages of a uniform size.
I suddenly have a new appreciation for spiral bound manuals, ring binder manuals. :-)
Good news for Apple II and Commodore 64 programmers reference manuals, IBM PC reference manuals, the 1983 pre-hardware release Inside Macintosh manual.
BTW, the precision paper cutting equipment should be somewhat common. Nearly every print shop (in the "printing press" sense not the "kinkos laser printer" sense) would have (had) such equipment, including high school shops.
How many of these books are already digital? Books going back to the 1990s are available online in HTML, CHM, PDF, and other formats.
I live 15 minutes away in Reisterstown. My work is done @ 5, be there right after work !
Guess it would be easier for the geeks to identify the manual process if there was a pid. ;)
Perhaps it would have also seemed silly to try to save many the scrolls from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria [wikipedia.org].
Or the Nag Hammadi texts ;-)
Thanks. I sent a donation your way. I, for one, appreciate it. This should be made its own project and funded by donations. Unfortunately, nobody cares. I have a sad.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."