[ih] Archive of internet-history email (and others)

[touch at strayalpha.com]

> Historians and repositories typically do NOT want the 450th copy of IBM
> manuals (or DEC manuals or whatever).  Though I note some stuff is
> difficult to find -- so worth doing a web search to see if the manual you
> have is available on-line.  If not, it may be useful.

Yeah - but I’ve seen this work to the detriment of those manuals.

Historians say “toss it” because the vendor probably has a copy or there are too many copies.

But vendors disappear and there’s the tragedy of the commons for the latter. E.g., I was looking for manuals for the Fairchild F8 in 1990, just three years after they had been consumed by National Semiconductor, who promptly discarded Fairchild’s tech library*.

I found a kind soul on a mailing list (before the web took off) who had an intact *set* of manuals on the line *and* an operational development board - which he gave me (and even paid postage). I do still have it and am now thinking it might be time to ship it off to the Computer History Museum…

Joe

*So that’s where ISI learned it from ;-)

—
Dr. Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
www.strayalpha.com