Kodak Reference Handbook (1945)
archive.org
archive.org
A glimpse at those docs makes me wonder how much knowledge is just lost due to the plug-n-play 3 page manual era where every project seems like a kinda reboot of the knowledge when the prior engineers left.
So handbooks like this can be seen as a "Kodak moment" of formalizing institutional knowledge. In new markets (which may be the future) there isn't going to be institutional knowledge yet.
Something similar might be the case with extremely serious car manufacturers with many decades of first-rate knowledge in building combustion engine cars.
[1] "January 19, 2012: Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company's stock was delisted from NYSE and moved to OTC exchange. ... Once the digital camera business is phased out, Kodak said its consumer business will focus on printing. It will seek a company to license its EasyShare digital camera brand."
In addition of being still alive in one form or another, their film business is getting better as people end up more and more getting into film photography. They actually announced that they cannot meet the current demand and are raising film prices and investing into new capacity[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Alaris [2] https://www.kodakalaris.com/ [3] https://kamerastore.com/breaking-news-kodak-to-raise-prices-...
The switch from film to digital happened a number of years earlier than their internal projections; and they bled cash in the interim.
I'd consider it an introductory textbook on photography, not documentation.
More importantly, this seems to be an external, public book, not internal documentation for engineers documenting the in-depth stuff that wasn't public. That would be interesting to see!
This books goes into the gritty details which one needs to be able to get good film photos and to repro them as paper photos etc. Things photographers just had to know when working with film.
Earlier you had to either test and document these details by yourself (one didn't have the luxury of Exif image data, one would need to jot the settings per photo into notebook etc), read them or be taught by someone who knew them, so in that sense not the typical intro textbook (ie. John Hedgecoe's Photography Basics etc). This is more akin to SDK reference + combined with Stack Overflow).
You can find old repair manuals for old vintage cameras. Found one for my dad's Kowa Super 66 which I broke after 11 rolls.
I have an Ektar 203mm lens in Kodak Supermatic shutter, the upgraded version of the anastigmat listed here. The Ektars were Kodak’s top-of-the-line lenses and it still works pretty well on my field camera.
IBM used to have great documentation for their systems, which they happily charged their customers money for hard copies. There really was not digital documentation. Microsoft has recently turned around the direction of their digital documentation (in a good way), which has been a huge organizational effort.
Every generation knows something preceding and succeeding generations do not.
Access to Unix, a remote (shared) compute resource (sit down at any terminal and log in), "write" and "talk" (after the first three-digit phone bill on a long-distance relationship), FTP sites, Usenet, and the online computerised library catalogue (backed by a paper resource rather than webpages) was a 10-20 year future timewarp for me in the mid-1980s. Little of this was accessible to anyone outside a limited (though at the time fairly substantial) number of universities and a handful of tech companies and government offices, nor would it be for another decade or more for the most part.
In terms of online access to published information, it's only been the emergence of Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, in the past 5 years or so, that's matched the earlier access I'd had. Access, I'll note, which I didn't make up for by paying academic-publishing highway-robbery rates, but simply went without (or satisficed with very occasional author-dropped copies on academic homepages).
Quality of documentation has of course varied. But the tradition of freely-available online information does date to the 1970s, and was very well established by the 1980s.