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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.
Came on, help this guy save these manuals. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
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)
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.
Vacuum tubes may not be coming back, but some aspects of the methods used to make and operate them may be useful in the future.
Since we can only guess at what bits of existing knowledge will be useful in the future, it is clearly prudent to save as much of the knowledge as we can.
The economic benefit from a single discovery or invention could pay for all of archive.org and textfiles.org
I need operator's and maintenance manuals for a Lewis Engineering Pyrometer, Model 73.
Have gnu, will travel.
Same. Tho I can't promise he wouldn't find me settled in a quiet corner reading the materials I was supposed to be packing.
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.
Good luck, mate! I'm still holding out hope for up-to-date documentation on the new Beeman spectrographs...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
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.
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.
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 ;-)
No, this is history. Specifically, some of it is our history. It is worth preserving. Am I the only one passionate about this besides him? Do you not get value from museums? Have you not been to their site and enjoyed the old text manuals and old references to BBS days?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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."
You can donate. Even if it is just a little. It is, unfortunately, PayPal only. Well, it was when I checked the site on Monday.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."