
Saving 25,000 Manuals - Doubleguitars
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683
======
robert_tweed
I am really glad someone is trying to save this collection. I started
collecting vintage hardware a few years ago and recently I've started focusing
on buying back old books that I now regret throwing away 20+ years ago. In
many cases, old books are becoming rarer than old hardware and software.

Some of these old books have some gems of information in them that you just
won't find in modern books. Things like hardware schematics are commonplace in
old programming manuals. In the 8-bit era it was usual to cover everything
from assembling the computer to programming it in the same book. There weren’t
dozens of blogs posts and “for dummies” books either: the manual was it. It
had to cover everything.

Then there are the useless factoids, my favourite of which is that Tron is
actually a command from old versions of Basic: TR(ace) ON. There is a
corresponding but less cool-sounding TROFF command. I was rather disappointed
that the names in Tron Legacy were all random nonsense, presumably because
nobody involved realised that that the names in the original were all real
computing terms from that era.

~~~
voltagex_
I went to a vintage bookstore the other day - the kind that has Keates' poetry
from the 1900s. They threw out all of their computer related books due to
space constraints and that no one was interested!

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srean
I had commented recently on another thread how Google bought all of the Usenet
data. At that time I welcomed it. But now google groups is on of the shittiest
services ever and its competition has long since disappeared. Btw there is no
hidden allusion here, thanks for doing this, just that I am plenty pissed by
how the groups story has come to pass.

~~~
wyclif
I'm currently in a very active Google Group that is about 4 or 5 years old. It
does what it's supposed to do; it's an email listserv. But I never see or use
the GG interface; I only use it over email. What is "shitty" about it?
Genuinely curious.

~~~
znfi
I think the main complaint is that it seems like Google, instead of developing
a great product that people actually want to use, are trying to lock people in
to what they already have.

I've never really used Google Groups, but then this might be a good thing in
this case. Just trying it quickly, there doesn't seem to be any way to
subscribe to a group without getting a Google account, I guess after doing so
you might be able to just forward it all to whatever email you want. But to an
outsider it certainly doesn't look like "an email listserv", and it's not
entirely clear how to use it as such.

Whether this makes Google Groups "shitty", I'm not sure. I guess a large part
of it is about expectations. Does Google still claim to "do no evil"? I'm sure
if it was Microsoft that was running the service then no one would be
surprised.

(Regarding the actual interface, atleast I find for example gmane to have a
much better interface, Google Groups seems very bloated with lots of dead
space. One additional thing, as a none native English speaker, Google Groups
shows for each message, a rather large box with a question asking if I'd like
a translation of that post. I have a hard time believing this feature is used
enough to warrant the amount of space that's spent on it.)

~~~
DanBC
> Whether this makes Google Groups "shitty", I'm not sure. I guess a large
> part of it is about expectations. Does Google still claim to "do no evil"?
> I'm sure if it was Microsoft that was running the service then no one would
> be surprised.

Microsoft had a bunch of newsgroups running onicrosoft servers. Some of those
newsgroups propagated outside MS.

It was a nice experience. There was the Microsoft MVP (most valued
professional) programme where people with in-depth knowledge of a product and
reasonable people-skills would provide peer support. Including the term MVP in
a web search would return the websites for those people. For years (and
probably still) those pages were sources of xcellent information about MS
products.

Here's one example. Search terms [excel fill handle MVP]

[http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/excel/fillhand.htm](http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/excel/fillhand.htm)

This page loads instantly. It tells me what the fill handle is, what it does,
how to use it, how to trouble shoot it, how to get more information about it,
how to use the existing MS Excel documentation to get this information. It
covers some advanced fill handle use, and some gotchas. It alsotells you whih
parts of this information are not found in the help files.

In this case: MS did good[1] things for Usenet. Google fucked it.

[1] ignoring the massive amounts of sub-optimality caused by OE having some
Usenet functionality but being buggy and insecure.

------
johansch
The web site for the collection/company, including a searchable database:

[http://www.manualsplus.com/](http://www.manualsplus.com/)

~~~
lucb1e
Wait, that means all manuals are already digital? So no information actually
gets lost, only the old hardcopies?

Edit: Nevermind, searchable database for which manual you want to buy a
hardcopy of, not the actual manual...

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Dnguyen
Anyone from Google here that can help out? That awesome book scanning system
you built would come in handy right now.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I was wondering this too, is seems like the entire warehouse could be packed
up and shipped for less than $25,000 so why not add these to the dataset that
is Google Books

~~~
greglindahl
Jason works for the Internet Archive, which has a very large (and cost-
effective) book scanning operation, and makes books as accessible as possible

~~~
Asparagirl
But the annual budget of the non-profit Internet Archive is probably the same
as Google's annual budget for White-Out and blue pens.

Dear Googlers (er, Alphabeters?) and others, please consider making a tax-
deductible donation to the archive:

[http://archive.org/donate/](http://archive.org/donate/)

------
yuvipanda
Just donated (paypal to jason at textfiles.com). I wonder if Patreon can be a
good way to do fundraising for things like this.

~~~
WalterBright
So did I. Now I have to explain why I sent money to "Bovine Ignition Systems".

------
anigbrowl
_It is 2am as I write this – I hope I don’t have to explain the inherent
meaningfulness, usefulness, and importance of saving as many unique manuals
from this collection as I can._

After poring over the photographs for a few minutes it appears that quite a
few of these are electronics manuals. But really, I have no idea what is
special about this collection or why it is suddenly so important to save it at
the last moment - presumably I'm just supposed to just go along with Jason
Scott's intuition that it's important.

Am I missing something?

~~~
textfiles
So your answer is "No, no I really think you do."

I will make a new entry mentioning you especially.

------
no1ne
Awesome work! Your dedication will surely inspire others to learn old tech and
understand how tech evolved. Can local museums help you in this regard? How
about Project Gutenberg or even Google?

~~~
acqq
It helps searching the name of the person who wrote the post:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott)

"In January 2009, he formed "Archive Team",[12] a group dedicated to
preserving the historical record of websites that close down. "

"Jason Scott was hired by the Internet Archive in 2011"

Or his about page:

[http://ascii.textfiles.com/about](http://ascii.textfiles.com/about)

"In 1998 he started a website called TEXTFILES.COM whose original mission was
to make available the thousands of BBS textfiles he’d collected in his youth,
but which has now expanded greatly in all directions of computer history."

Recommended video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq70QKa7588](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq70QKa7588)

"That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars"

~~~
sp332
He works for the Internet Archive, but this isn't an IA project. He's the
"face" of Archive Team, but this isn't an AT project (not that AT projects are
ever really official). This is just a Jason Scott project, which is why he's
asking the whole world for help.

------
WalterBright
This is great work, and often thankless. Thank you!

Any plans to scan them and put them on line?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What's the status of automated book scanning - I can see how one could easily
cut off the spine and scan looseleafs (looseleaves?); but when the book must
be preserved ... there's surely a robot book scanner?

~~~
tim333
I would like a robot book scanner. Here's one, the ScanRobot® 2.0 MDS
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmhIJOqepVU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmhIJOqepVU&feature=youtu.be&t=40s)

It doesn't give the price and I imagine it's quite expensive though.

There's also [https://youtu.be/dByUFS-YJDo?t=1m34s](https://youtu.be/dByUFS-
YJDo?t=1m34s)

and
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX0g4aNynro&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX0g4aNynro&feature=youtu.be&t=1m3s)

None look terrible cheap and they all seem to need a human to load up the book
to begin with though they can turn pages automatically.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
[http://linearbookscanner.org/](http://linearbookscanner.org/)

------
midgetjones
This is wonderful. It's terrifying to think that such relatively recent
knowledge could just disappear thanks to our poor long-term storage solutions.

In some ways it's getting worse, really; at least you don't need proprietary
hardware and software to read a 50 year-old book.

------
alex_g
I love looking through old manuals when I come across them at auctions, yard
sales, etc. I love looking at the illustrations but rarely ever read into that
manual at an in-depth level. I mainly like looking at them from a historic
point of view, not a technological one.

------
fezz
Old manuals are also great for showing prior art agains patent trolls.

------
userbinator
I wonder if archive.org might be interested in adding these to their
collection - they already host quite a few scanned manuals.

~~~
ersii
Jason Scott (HN user "textfiles") works at the Internet Archive, which
operates archive.org.

------
contingencies
Technical manuals back to the 1930s? Not sure which devices were produced
quite that early but I suppose it should be interesting in the field of
phototypesetting history -
[http://haagens.com/oldtype.tpl.html#2G](http://haagens.com/oldtype.tpl.html#2G)

~~~
kw71
1930s = radio, there were also electrical instruments available at that time
(for instance AVO voltmeter)

~~~
jonsen
(Avometer(tm). Ampere, Volt, Ohm meter.)

------
iveqy
But why?

(actually a curious question. Why is this interesting to you?)

~~~
jonsen
Quality. Examples of great quality. Completeness, consistency, correctness,
attention to detail, readability, typography, pedagogy ... you name it.
Sometimes you find it all in old manuals. And you may wonder how they managed
to get away with such thoroughness.

~~~
Touche
And will make you feel ashamed of your README.md.

------
nickpsecurity
Textfiles.com is a nice piece of Internet history that goes back to BBS days
and still has useful stuff. More power to them. That collection is pretty
awesome. Many think the stuff is dated and useless but I've solved so many
problems for modern stuff by just reading on old works that did the same.
Their solutions usually disappeared for economic reasons despite being
technically superior in certain ways.

People looking for manuals on old computers and devices combing for that
wisdom (or just curiosity) should check out this site too:

[http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/](http://bitsavers.trailing-
edge.com/pdf/)

------
roflchoppa
I like old manuals but i don't really like searching for the correct one, and
having to deal with 25k manuals in various sizes.

Someone should look into
[http://store.diybookscanner.org](http://store.diybookscanner.org) and just
scanning them all, then processing them with a pdf->text software. and just
have them searchable so that they can be used in the future if they need to
be...

Whats the time limit for archiving these types of documents in terms of
copyrights?

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HeyLaughingBoy
This is such a shame. I know people who would probably pay good money for
those GenRad manuals pictured. And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg
of what's stored.

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msie
It's unfortunate that news about this only surfaced through today's post when
some people have known about it for a year.

------
jhallenworld
Well this is depressing. I don't see how he is going to succeed with this
project- it's a huge undertaking.

I think manuals like this should all end up on bitsavers.org

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m3talridl3y
Want to make a difference in the world? Forget politics, help preserve
information.

