Saving 25,000 Manuals | Hacker News Reader

Saving 25,000 Manuals

ascii.textfiles.com

314 pointsDoubleguitars68 comments

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 visit the dollar bookstore weekly. You always find something interesting.

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'm suffering the same problems as I'm getting into using old vintage gear for music production.

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]

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.).

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.

[1] https://groups.google.com/advanced_search

[2] https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2371405

It was called DejaNews--a great service for search Usenet history.

The interesting thing with Google Groups is that Google cannot even crawl its own pages.

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.

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.

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

http://www.manualsplus.com/

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...

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

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

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

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/

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

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

I donated as well, and look forward to seeing these manuals digitized one day.

Same here.

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.

Just donated as well, great cause!

All your donations are appreciated. It has made assembling the project a thousand times easier.

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?

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

I will make a new entry mentioning you especially.

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?

The people who submit the links here aren't necessarily the people who created the thing that is linked to.

I see. Thank-You. Hopefully the actual person reads this though :)

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

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."