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.

Hopefully not a result...

[TWX]

...of him wanting our AOL cds [slashdot.org]...

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.

Re:

[Tx]

Yes. What's he going to do with them, scan them? I didn't get anything from the links except that he's trying to "save" them, no explanation of what for. If he's just going to store them somewhere else, then I have to wonder what the point is, as the chances of them ever falling in to the hands of someone who is going to find them useful are pretty small. At least if they're scanned and OCRed, there's a decent chance at least some of them will end up being useful.

Re:Hopefully not a result...

[bigdady92]

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.

Re:Hopefully not a result...

[drinkypoo]

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 :)

Re:

[drinkypoo]

TBH, I think you should have probably carried your "why should I care" sentiment with you to the flea market. Might help reiterate why you're asking again.

Five bucks is cheaper than I can build a decent one and if it doesn't work it goes to the transfer station and into the electronics recycling bin for free. But I have some radios I want to check out and I need one. Still need a generator.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 s

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[KGIII]

Then donate. I don't want to be the only one. Actually, I am sure I am not the only one. Still, dig deep and donate. This is important.

Re:

[imaradiostar]

"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 pers

Re:

[TWX]

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 w

Re:

[hjf]

are you really underestimating the power of things like reCAPTCHA for stuff like this?

Re:

[djdavetrouble]

Yeah google sneakily crowdsourced this ages ago....

Re:

[Colin Castro]

Sneakily?

Re:

[petermgreen]

OTOH creating the electronic equivilent of a ratty photocopy is pretty easy.

While dealing with the electronic equivilent of a ratty photocopy is not exactly pleasant it's usually better than not having any documentation at all.

Re:

[cdrudge]

So what's the excuse why FSM of the modern age that were completely created electronically still cost an arm and a leg, and the electronic version even more? I can get a paper version for my 2005 Rendezvous for $200, or an online version for $20 for 3 days, $150 for 1 month, or $1200 for a year.

I remember back when I had a 1990 Talon. Some kind soul within the community acquired the FSM, trimmed the spin, and hand scanned every page into a PDF. Was the quality perfect? Not even close. Was it more than usa

Re:

[TWX]

Because the nature of the demand for the product allows them to charge that for it.

Thank goodness for spiral bound ...

[perpenso]

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.

Re:

[TWX]

This is true. The main reason I mentioned it is that the people that made the manuals would often have people offer a book to them, not having any idea how much work it takes and how it destroys the original, and how even relatively-common specialized equipment is needed that most people do not have ready access to.

Re:

[morgauxo]

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.

Drop in the bucket

[Etherwalk]

Seems like a planning problem. Storage is a drop in the bucket for a big org and there could be some goodwill for this, plus maaaaaybe some utility for anyone who supports legacy systems. Does LOC want them? Smithsonian? Some tech museum? Or one of the big tech companies?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:

[KGIII]

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?

Re:

[PPH]

I need operator's and maintenance manuals for a Lewis Engineering Pyrometer, Model 73.

Re:

[GTRacer]

Good luck, mate! I'm still holding out hope for up-to-date documentation on the new Beeman spectrographs...

Re:Drop in the bucket

[tipo159]

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.

Re:Seems silly

[Arrogant-Bastard]

Perhaps it would have also seemed silly to try to save many the scrolls from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria [wikipedia.org]. 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.

Re:

[sribe]

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 [wikipedia.org] texts ;-)

Re:

[KGIII]

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.

#SaveTheManuals

[martiniturbide]

Came on, help this guy save these manuals. https://www.flickr.com/photos/... [flickr.com]

Re:

[martiniturbide]

Here goes some pictures of today's work:

https://twitter.com/textfiles/... [twitter.com]

https://twitter.com/textfiles/... [twitter.com]

Re:

[Coren22]

Are you involved with the project? How long does he intend to be working on it? I could help this weekend, but my weeks are already overbooked :(

Old, but still usable

[Behrooz Amoozad]

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.

Re:

[Kreplock]

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.

Re:

[KGIII]

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.

BBS Documentary guy, among other things

[jerel]

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.

Re:

[Mystic Pixel]

Your comment reinforced my conviction that I had to make it over there. Glad I did. Jason is a great fellow and I'm glad I was able to help out, even if only in a minor capacity.