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.
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?
It's usually cheaper to employ a couple of people on minimum wage to do the scanning.
The Usenet etext / ebook groups used to have some useful faqs about best scanning / OCR techniques. I don't know the right words to make Google return anything useful.
The only thing not automated is turning the pages. Books come in a wide range of sizes and materials, they may be damaged or fragile, etc. Human hands are dexterous and self-repairing. I believe they did experiment with automated page turning at one point, though I don't know the details.
One of my hobbies is to repair and restore antique metrology, test equipment, and vacuum tube radios. I would not have been able to do any of it if it were not for those who have scanned and shared a large volume of old technical documents. A library like this makes me very jealous.
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.
There are a lot of interesting circuits in some of those schematics that have been lost to the sands of time. Mostly because the same functionality got put into some noname IC that is now three generations gone, but perhaps didn't perform the same way.
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
I saw a line of GenRad/General Radio manuals that immediately started me drooling. And there are likely many more jewels in the pile.
I think General Radio got their start in the 'teens of the 20th century.
I also have old tools and instruments from 50+ years ago that I have no information on. Would not be surprised if there were old Sheffield Instruments manuals somewhere in there.
1930s isn't exactly ancient history. By 1930, for example, we had commercial aviation, a long-distance phone network, and experimental television stations.
Of course we also had vacuum cleaners, steam engines, automobiles, combines, and all sorts of other things that needed manuals. At https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=310 you can hear mention of the manual that came with a 1925 steam car. ("In the handbook it says 'Things for your man to do every day.'")
I could see there’s probably a wealth of knowledge in manuals for mechanical calculators, printing, agriculture machinery, photography, steam, hydrodynamics, etc.
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?
"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."
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.
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.
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.
Oh the GG interface absolutely. Its one if the slowest, most bloated site out there. Have you tried searching ? Search was precisely why I had been so welcoming of them buying all Usenet data. GG habitually gobbles up Github notifications too. I think the current experience is much worse than yahoo groups an déjà of yore and they did more than being just a listserv and did it better.
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.)
The manager of a group can add emails of people without google accounts. They then only get emails (no web interface meaning no searching) and they cannot change the settings from digest to individual though the manager can. A wee bit unfriendly, to be sure, but it gets it done.
> 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]
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately, "Do No Evil" does not include, "Don't Be A Dick."
Google has killed 15-20 years worth of information that's not only of interest for it's history, but for the still useful conversations on damned near any topic you can think of.
Ok, so not everything is still useful. I can't argue that since there were plenty of sports and entertainment groups, but there were also many groups whose information doesn't really become stale. In hiding this data, Google has fucked over anyone who might have benefited from finding it.
Hell, the very damned first time I ever heard of Google was an announcement on USENET. I thought they were pretty slick then and I started using Google instead of DogPile(? I think it was dogpile. That was a long time ago.).
You can create a Google account for any email address...no need to create a gmail account just to setup forwarding to somewhere else. Or will those accounts not work with Google Groups?
Google Groups has various options, one of which is a comparatively poor web-based front-end to Usenet. (Yes, there are still active Usenet groups.) Getting this right across multiple browsers isn't easy, but Google Groups postings to Usenet can be pretty badly formatted.
Some history: Google acquired DejaNews and the contents of other usenet archives, and has largely let all of that data languish, with what can sometimes be very weak search abilities of the archives via Google Groups (no hits for XYZ in an active group for XYZ, for instance), and where Google doesn't make the Usenet archives available and visible via the main search Google engine, and has generally become somewhat of problem.
Then there are the folks that dredge up a decades-old usenet thread — possibly having no idea what Usenet is — and post to it, and with the usual hilarity that ensues. "Hey, is PDQ still available?" to a post offering PDQ that originally posted in 1997, etc.
By some appearances, Google Groups is headed in the same direction as Google Reader.
My main complaint is the search interface. When they first put the Deja News archive online, the search function was very good. It even improved over the first few years.
One great thing is that USENET posts were dated, so you could look for the first occurrence of a word, phrase, rumor, etc. That's hard to do on the web.
Then, a few years ago, the search function started to get worse with every release, with reduced functionality and more and more unreliable results. You might search for a term and see a result from 2005. Then, when you limited results to before 2006, you would get nothing! Around the time they were trying to force Google-plus integration, it became nearly unusable.
There used to be an advanced search page[1], but that's gone. When you search within a group, there's a pull-down for advanced search options, but that's missing from the main cross-group search. It seems that search operators[2] may still work.
The same kind of degradation happened with Google News Archive and, to a lesser extent, Google Books.
Google wants webmasters to "opt in" and let Google access #! URLs without using Javascript (they want to be able to use a bot). This is done by providing an alternative "escaped_fragment" URL.
But Google themselves will not allow users to access Google Groups #! URLs without using Javascript. They will not provide alternative "escaped_fragment" URLs. Why not?
Search for the newsgroup comp.unix.soures and you will see an error message that Googlebot was unable to access Google Groups because of its robots.txt
Of course, you will also see comp.unix.sources has (fortunately) been mirrored on numerous servers elsewhere, probably well before the Google acquisition of Deja.
I think Google should give these old newsgroups back to the community in their original format.
What I don't get is that they've implemented their own support forums on a variant of Google groups and it has the same shitty lag as the Usenet archive. You'd think they would care about making their own services work right. Then again they've let the flagship maps site decay into a laggy POS too.
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.
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!
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
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:
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.
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.
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
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?
72 comments
[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadAny plans to scan them and put them on line?
It doesn't give the price and I imagine it's quite expensive though.
There's also https://youtu.be/dByUFS-YJDo?t=1m34s
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX0g4aNynro&feature=youtu.be...
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.
The Usenet etext / ebook groups used to have some useful faqs about best scanning / OCR techniques. I don't know the right words to make Google return anything useful.
The only thing not automated is turning the pages. Books come in a wide range of sizes and materials, they may be damaged or fragile, etc. Human hands are dexterous and self-repairing. I believe they did experiment with automated page turning at one point, though I don't know the details.
(actually a curious question. Why is this interesting to you?)
I think General Radio got their start in the 'teens of the 20th century.
I also have old tools and instruments from 50+ years ago that I have no information on. Would not be surprised if there were old Sheffield Instruments manuals somewhere in there.
Of course we also had vacuum cleaners, steam engines, automobiles, combines, and all sorts of other things that needed manuals. At https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=310 you can hear mention of the manual that came with a 1925 steam car. ("In the handbook it says 'Things for your man to do every day.'")
To be concrete, here's a copy of the instruction manual for a 51-P Crosley radio receiver from 1924: http://www.crosleyradios.com/pdf/51P_Operating_Instructions.... . A "Manual of wireless telegraphy (radio) for the use of naval electricians" from 1915: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433023245677;vie... . And "A practical guide for the use of the Edison phonograph" from 1892: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433023245677;vie...
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
"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
"That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars"
Mel (from The Story of Mel) was identified thanks to an old LGP-30 manual. I'd hate to miss out on treasures like that in the future.
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.
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.)
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
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.
Unfortunately, "Do No Evil" does not include, "Don't Be A Dick."
Google has killed 15-20 years worth of information that's not only of interest for it's history, but for the still useful conversations on damned near any topic you can think of.
Ok, so not everything is still useful. I can't argue that since there were plenty of sports and entertainment groups, but there were also many groups whose information doesn't really become stale. In hiding this data, Google has fucked over anyone who might have benefited from finding it.
Hell, the very damned first time I ever heard of Google was an announcement on USENET. I thought they were pretty slick then and I started using Google instead of DogPile(? I think it was dogpile. That was a long time ago.).
Some history: Google acquired DejaNews and the contents of other usenet archives, and has largely let all of that data languish, with what can sometimes be very weak search abilities of the archives via Google Groups (no hits for XYZ in an active group for XYZ, for instance), and where Google doesn't make the Usenet archives available and visible via the main search Google engine, and has generally become somewhat of problem.
Then there are the folks that dredge up a decades-old usenet thread — possibly having no idea what Usenet is — and post to it, and with the usual hilarity that ensues. "Hey, is PDQ still available?" to a post offering PDQ that originally posted in 1997, etc.
By some appearances, Google Groups is headed in the same direction as Google Reader.
One great thing is that USENET posts were dated, so you could look for the first occurrence of a word, phrase, rumor, etc. That's hard to do on the web.
Then, a few years ago, the search function started to get worse with every release, with reduced functionality and more and more unreliable results. You might search for a term and see a result from 2005. Then, when you limited results to before 2006, you would get nothing! Around the time they were trying to force Google-plus integration, it became nearly unusable.
There used to be an advanced search page[1], but that's gone. When you search within a group, there's a pull-down for advanced search options, but that's missing from the main cross-group search. It seems that search operators[2] may still work.
The same kind of degradation happened with Google News Archive and, to a lesser extent, Google Books.
[1] https://groups.google.com/advanced_search
[2] https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2371405
This is because it fails to follow its own specification for "escaped_fragment" URLs.
http://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/s...
http://groups.google.com/robots.txt
Google wants webmasters to "opt in" and let Google access #! URLs without using Javascript (they want to be able to use a bot). This is done by providing an alternative "escaped_fragment" URL.
But Google themselves will not allow users to access Google Groups #! URLs without using Javascript. They will not provide alternative "escaped_fragment" URLs. Why not?
Search for the newsgroup comp.unix.soures and you will see an error message that Googlebot was unable to access Google Groups because of its robots.txt
Of course, you will also see comp.unix.sources has (fortunately) been mirrored on numerous servers elsewhere, probably well before the Google acquisition of Deja.
I think Google should give these old newsgroups back to the community in their original format.
http://www.manualsplus.com/
Edit: Nevermind, searchable database for which manual you want to buy a hardcopy of, not the actual manual...
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.
Dear Googlers (er, Alphabeters?) and others, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the archive:
http://archive.org/donate/
I think manuals like this should all end up on bitsavers.org
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/
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?
I will make a new entry mentioning you especially.
Someone should look into 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?