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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.
Since he works with/at the Internet Archive he will be scanning all these documents in and posting them online for everyone to see and view.
He cannot do the scanning right now as the owners need to close the warehouse down and cull the books.
The owners are going through and tossing duplicates into the dumpster and leaving only 1 or 2 good copies of the manuals, this will cut down on the clutter and make the packing and sorting easier. The logistics are still being worked on but he's got a few storage units and after everything is moved out then the process of scanning/copying begins.
Being that he works with/at the biggest digital hoarding warehouse on the interwebs I think we will see 10s of thousands of interesting and bizzare reads coming out of this haul in the next years. Granted 99% of this stuff isn't around any more but the information may be useful down the road to someone looking to recreate some tech that was done decades ago but no one remembers how it was done (Apollo rocket engines, samurai swords, types of pottery, etc.)
Amicable goal and I wish I was there to help.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Some acquaintances of mine were the authorized distributor of electronic Mopar factory service manuals. The act of creating the electronic manual from the paper manual to professional standards is extremely involved. 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. They're scanned, but since they're old the scanning process has to be baby-sat to deal with feed errors, and once they're scanned they have to be reviewed for any optical issues, then to be indexed they're OCRed, that proof-read by machine and spot-checked by a human (remember, machines do not handle technical formatting well) and then tables-of-contents for the book and the chapters have to be created.
That's why it's easy for a popular FSM to cost $100, and for less popular titles to easily cross $200, and explains why some models never get good electronic documentation if there's little to no demand. Remember, this is for cars that were produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands in a single model-year.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.'"
Whatever makes you think the machines no longer exist? There is tons of old equipment available at hamfests, ebay and various surplus outlets. This stuff is what allows young hobyists that don't have their employer's bank acount backing them get into electronics in the first place! If these were scanned and placed online this would be a tremendous value to a lot of people.
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.
Here goes some pictures of today's work:
https://twitter.com/textfiles/...
https://twitter.com/textfiles/...
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.
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 )
Granted 99% of this stuff isn't around any more but the information may be useful down the road to someone looking to recreate some tech that was done decades ago but no one remembers how it was done (Apollo rocket engines, samurai swords, types of pottery, etc.)
Additionally, those old manuals could be instrumental in establishing prior art for some of the stupid business method/code patents that keep cropping up, much like that ~90 year old page of sheet music that was found recently that might just slam-dunk the Happy Birthday copyright into the public domain.
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.
"Granted 99% of this stuff isn't around any more" -that seems harsh considering how many 80's and 90's era scopes, voltmeters, and analyzers of various kinds are still in use across the country! I use an HP/Agilent dynamic analyzer (3562a, 35665a, 35670a) almost every day at work. Sure, newer stuff might have more features but for fast, accurate, calibrated measurements in literally seconds nothing beats late Cold War era hardware that HAD to work and get stuff done daily. OK, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask but I work for a company that needed manuals for some 80's and 90's hardware and a friend who was there just acquired them for me and I'm so thankful. He also got some stuff for old and broken (but very valuable) hardware I've been wanting to repair and use. It's an exciting time for geeks like me. The thing to keep in mind here is this stuff deals with the basics of electronics; things that won't ever change unless the laws of physics are suddenly different. The concepts and methods described in this technical literature are priceless, often giving better real-world use than any internet page could teach. It will be valuable for generations to come. I'm glad to see much of it is going to be digitized and shared.