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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.
Granted 99% of this stuff isn't around any more
I looked briefly to see "why should I care" and I saw they were saving a bunch of old workshop manuals for obscure electronics equipment. And then I had a sort of Fallout fantasy in my head for a few seconds about someone digging the frequency analyzer I just picked up at the flea market out of the rubble and getting the documentation needed to repair it from this archive :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
A good example is electronic signals taught in Electrical Engineering books. I found myself having a hard time getting reliable information about MFM/RLL harddrive encoding. Then one day I open this ancient book I grabbed at the library sell-off 10 years ago. Entire chapter on it.
Another great example is Palm OS programming. After they went belly up the developer portal and all non 3rd party information went into the void. Thankfully this guy managed to save in bulk most of the important documentation and software Palm Archive (And semi related, this guy managed to snag most drivers/cds for sony CLIE models Sony Clie Archive )