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Bitsavers

bitsavers.org

166 pointstosh22 comments

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?!

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?

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.

No, they're not descriptive enough. Without context, the word archive doesn't make it clear at all what this is or how it differs from lots of other archive sites.

A simple paragraph could be put together by the site owners in minutes and then they'd be fine.

The site has admirable aims, they just need encouragement to explain it better

Agreed. A small intro would be ideal I think

"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)

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

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.

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... 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 !

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.

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

Haven't looked around much but this must be my favorite folder so far: 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?

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.

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

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

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

Yes, it is full of information on how systems programming actually looked like across the industry before UNIX got widespread outside AT&T.

Xerox, Apple, IBM, ETHZ, Unisys, Burroughs, DEC, Compaq related literature is quite interesting.

Other similar resources:

* http://vaxhaven.com/

Note in particular the extensive doco collection.

* http://www.os2museum.com/

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

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. "

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