
Bitsavers - tosh
http://www.bitsavers.org/
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mnoe09nt34
Would be nice if there was a description of what it is when you load the page.
I spent several minutes looking at and reading various unrelated things about
how they scan documents and where the mirrors are, with absolutely no
description of what it actually contained. WTF?!

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userbinator
_Would be nice if there was a description of what it is when you load the
page._

The first 5 links on the page, all of which contain the word "Archive", aren't
descriptive enough?

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thesephist
Personally, having no clue on the background of what/who "Bitsavers" is/was,
just the words "Software Archive" or "Communications archive" help little.
Software of _what_? Communications for _whom_? Took a bit of browsing to
orient myself.

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pasta
_" Bitsavers is an arm of the Computer History Museum which has the goal of
making scanned documentation and engineering drawings, and machine-readable
source code and object code of old computers available on the Internet.

It has a number of mirrors around the Internet; requests to the main Bitsavers
site are automatically re-directed to one of the mirrors."_

(from [http://gunkies.org/wiki/Bitsavers](http://gunkies.org/wiki/Bitsavers))

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Bromskloss
Why do people not always begin by telling the visitor what the site is about?

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pasta
Maybe because the context was different in the old days of the internet. Most
sites were linked from index pages or link rings.

Now we have search engines and people might stumble upon your page.

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GeorgeTirebiter
This is the life-long volunteer work of Al Kossow, who is now Software Curator
at the Computer History Museum.
[http://www.computerhistory.org/softwarehistory/team/Al,Kosso...](http://www.computerhistory.org/softwarehistory/team/Al,Kossow/)
Also a 'thank you!' to the various mirrors that help share their bandwidth.
Yes, a truly incredible and inspirational contribution to all geeks interested
in preserving those bits! Al does this because he thinks it's important. True
Hacker Spirit !

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Waterluvian
I love when webpages load instantly. When I was a teen I thought the future
was just really fast web 1.0 style pages. I feel instant nostalgia when I load
up a very simple page.

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AlexCoventry
The "Tour of Go" web pages are nice, this way.

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kccqzy
Haven't looked around much but this must be my favorite folder so far:
[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/brochures/Lisa/](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/brochures/Lisa/)

The Apple Lisa is a pretty neglected piece of Apple history, having been
overshadowed by the Macintosh. So I'm glad that there's a wealth of
information about it here.

Also Apple's marketing materials in the 1980s also had a very different feel
compared with what we have today, with the copy being generally much longer.
I'm also curious how these marketing brochures are produced; it doesn't seem
like the Lisa is powerful enough to typeset these brochures, does it?

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EFruit
Bitsavers PDF archive was a lifesaver when I was working with IBM 360/370
emulation. This is one of the only places on the net that has the sense to
preserve not just the software, but even the manuals of computing history.

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msla
Yes, despite how good the Multicians website is, Bitsavers is the only way to
use most of the software in the Multics distribution.

[http://www.multicians.org/multics.html](http://www.multicians.org/multics.html)

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squarefoot
What a goldmine! The components section is filled with not so easy to find
data books on old parts. Thanks!

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reaperducer
There's an archive of programs on paper tape for Cromemco[0] machines! That's
crazy. And awesome. And crazy awesome.

[0]: Think 1970's Z-80 processors and S-100 buses:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco)

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JdeBP
Other similar resources:

* [http://vaxhaven.com/](http://vaxhaven.com/)

Note in particular the extensive doco collection.

* [http://www.os2museum.com/](http://www.os2museum.com/)

M. Necasek deals in more than just OS/2.

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MarkMMullin
OK, that was fun - dug up an old quote from the Ithaca Intersystems linker
manual I always loved (quote, not manual) -- "This program is dedicated to and
named after a good friend, Link Hogthrob. "

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crooked-v
This is all kinds of impressive. I wonder if they take donations.

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natmaka
See also [https://softwareheritage.org](https://softwareheritage.org)

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sergiotapia
What is this?

