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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.
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.
No. No one wants it. It is junk, like most storage places. Why people want to keep junk around I'll never figure out. Some of those manuals are for vacuum tube stuff. Vacuum tubes aren't making a comeback. If someone needed it, it would have been referenced in the last 20 years and it would have been saved.
And it is attitudes like this that demonstrate why anyone who has been in the computer industry for a while keeps seeing reinvention of the wheel and bogus patents that don't recognize prior art. I guess that is one way to create internet billionaires, but it isn't helpful for the industry in general.