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Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- donpdonp 11y agoContext/Background link: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683 tl;dr: A technical manual reseller in Finksburg, MD is throwing out 25,000 high-quality paper manuals from as far back as the 1930s this week and Jason Scott & friends are driving there with "$900 of banker's boxes" to save whatever they can.
- nadams 11y agoI know many people may be thinking "just throw it out". But you don't understand - you may be faced with system that is in one of those manuals and some previous genius decided that when they cleaned their office to toss that manual. Or even come into possession of one of those systems and have no idea how to use it. If google hadn't crawled the manual for certain products I would have thrown away a number of electronic paperweights.
- rasz_pl 11y agoThose are manuals for 40-80 year old technology, something second year EE student could explain to you in their sleep. The only value they posses is historical.
- avian 11y agoThis is incredibly naive. Many second year EE students today will not even know what a vacuum tube is, much less be able to explain how a device using them works. Even if you're used to looking at discrete transistor circuits (and even that is getting rare these days), a device with tubes can look like magic of the highest order.
- acdha 11y agoSeconded. Another factor is that looking at a device won't tell you why it was designed the way it was. A good technical manual will be invaluable for telling you things like valid ranges, service or environmental limits, etc. which would otherwise need to be reverse-engineered. If you're trying to replace an old system or studying the history, know what does and doesn't matter can save a ton of time. (This goes double if the manual was annotated by a good operator)
- rasz_pl 11y agoTubes are history, so you pretty much agree with me? :) I didnt say those manuals are unimportant and should go into the landfill, I pointed out they are of historical nature, not something you would actually use today.
- engi_nerd 11y agoThe Thunderstrike exploit for EFI required knowledge of the option ROM, which is a little bit of legacy tech left over from the original IBM PCs. Check out this[0] overview. Hacking a modern machine using, in part, information taken from the Intel 8088 architecture reference manual! Also, my EE studies largely skipped over the analog world entirely. There were two courses on linear circuits, but they talked very little about analog (not a single mention of a vacuum tube to be found). Your assumption that a second year EE student could explain this to you is no longer correct in 2015 as most programs are similar to what I went through. [0]: https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike_31c3 https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike_31c3
- rasz_pl 11y agoApples and monkeys. Option rom is extensively documented and part of every bios hacking writepu. Example: https://books.google.pl/books/about/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjutsu_Uncovered.html?id=2N40AAAACAAJ https://books.google.pl/books/about/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjuts... authors blog http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/ http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/ free book download: http://www.lejabeach.com/sisubb/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjutsu_Uncovered.pdf http://www.lejabeach.com/sisubb/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjutsu_Un... It isnt some arcane knowledge only dying out grey beards would know about.
- engi_nerd 11y agoNo, it isn't arcane -- in part because those old manuals are around.
- rasz_pl 11y ago:/ its like saying we know how to program in x86 assembly only because of some 34 year old books.
- engi_nerd 11y agoThat wasn't what I meant at all in my original post, and apologies for not expressing myself clearly. But it's good that those manuals are preserved, as they capture the original context of the system's use. I have another post on this thread where I talk about some uses I've had for old manuals. That's the sort of thing I'm getting at. The GE engine manuals, for instance, aren't arcane in the context of CH-46 maintenance, but in the broader context of printed material they are extremely arcane.
- monochromatic 11y ago> Why are these even worth anything or worth keeping, tidy your life, lighten up, etc. Either you really understand why 80 years of manuals, instructions and engineering notes related to 20th century electronics are of value both historically, aesthetically and culturally, or you don’t. To try to make the case would be a waste of time for both of us. I'm not sure I do understand the motivation, but I don't think that I'm beyond understanding it. Is it that some of these systems are still in service? Is it just the history/archeology aspect?
- simonw 11y ago"Historically, aesthetically and culturally". This isn't about saving manuals so people can keep running 80-year-old systems that are still in service. This is about history.
- lmitchell 11y agoAnd learning from past works of science and engineering is how we keep learning and growing as a human race. So yeah, history - specifically science history, which is arguably even more important than your average history.
- chris_wot 11y agoTechnology and science doesn't exist in a vacuum.
- mindcrime 11y agoThis isn't about saving manuals so people can keep running 80-year-old systems that are still in service. I think it would be more correct to say that it isn't only about that. As somebody above pointed out, "technology never dies". You'd be shocked what you'll find still running out there if you look in the right places. Forget Silicon Valley for a minute... go find a manufacturing plant in the midwest or in the southeast somewhere, or even in the rust belt. A plant that makes some kind of goofy sub-assembly for producing something, where none of us have even though about that sub-assembly or would know what it was if we saw it. In that kind of place you'll still find all sorts of seemingly archaic technology... old IBM mainframes with drum hard-disk drives where the drum weighs about 50 lbs and stores 50MB of data. IBM S/36 and S/38 minicomputers, DEC PDP/11's, old VAX machines, you name it, it's out there. Heck, go check in some non-profit telephone cooperative somewhere in rural america... I'd be you'll find more of the same there. And so on, and so on...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 11y ago25k sounds like a lot, but from the pictures it looks like most of them are not very thick and it'd be relatively easy to grab a whole stack of them at once. From my estimation that is around the size of a small library. If they can be removed from the shelves and boxed at an average rate of 5 per second, that's 5,000 seconds or <1.5h at the most. Even after adding in trips to the new storage location, packaging, unloading, etc., and considering it's a trivially parallelisable task, it definitely seems doable to move the whole collection of 25k within a few hours.
- GauntletWizard 11y agoI doubt you'll get anywhere near 5 per second, even with a large number of people working on it. A single person will likely need 5-10 seconds to grab a manual from a shelf, place it in a banker's box, and move on to the next one. You'd need 25-50 people to get that. Still, even if it's 100 person-hours, it's an achievable goal; A dozen volunteers over the course of a day can do so.
- userbinator 11y agoA single person will likely need 5-10 seconds to grab a manual from a shelf, place it in a banker's box, and move on to the next one. If you look at the pictures like this one: http://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/IMG_6993.jpg http://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/IMG_69... I could probably grab 25 or more of those at a time and set them in a box in 5 seconds, hence 5 per second. Getting the first ones out (because there is little "gap" to stuff hands into on the shelf) will be slower, but once the gap is made the whole pile easily comes out. This isn't about pulling one out at a time, spending another few seconds inspecting it, and then putting it in a box; it's about getting them off the shelves and out of the building ASAP.
- raldi 11y agoKeep in mind, you also have to remove just one unique copy of each set, and throw the rest away, being very careful not to accidentally throw out a "duplicate" that is actually a similar-looking, but unique, manual.
- pmorici 11y agoLooks like the place is in Finksburg Maryland. about 30 minutes from Baltimore and an hour from DC.
- e0 11y agoWhy does he say the Linear Book Scanner (https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/ https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/) destroys books? I thought the idea of the Linear Book Scanner was to automatically scan books without cutting the binding. Anyhow, cool project.
- pmorici 11y agoThe FAQ on the linear book scanner site says the following, "Prototype 1 could scan the majority of books without damage, but may tear one or two pages in some books. Out of 50 books tested, 45% had one or two of their pages either torn or folded. This is a very early prototype and there are many areas for improvement in the design."
- e0 11y agoOk, thanks. I read that, but I thought there might be some other, more dire reports of its use. I guess we just differ on what it means to destroy a book. When I read Jason's comment, it sounded like he was saying that the linear book scanner rendered the book unusable after scanning.
- m0dest 11y agoLook into commercial book scanners that use vacuums. This is a solved problem. Kirtas is one of those manufacturers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds63ZBXFdLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds63ZBXFdLM http://www.kirtas.com/ http://www.kirtas.com/ 50 pages per hour with no damage to the books. You're looking at $50k-$90k for the equipment plus $8k/year service contract, though. So you need to figure out whether book scanning is something that the Internet Archive is interested in, beyond this project.
- pmorici 11y agoI was over there yesterday morning helping sort and it seemed like the vast vast majority of the books were either ring binders or spiral bound and could easily be taken out of the binding to be scanned in a standard scanner.
- Animats 11y agoIt's great that someone is doing this. The person involved is affiliated with the Internet Archive, so they will know about their book scanning capabilities.[1] Once they have the books in storage, the next step is to take a picture of each cover, and put those on line. With an inventory, people will be able to ask for (and perhaps pay for) digitization. [1] https://archive.org/details/partnerdocs https://archive.org/details/partnerdocs
- rebootthesystem 11y agoHaving gone through the gut-wrenching task of choosing which data books to throw out on more than one occasion I fully understand the value and sentiment of this project. As a young hobbyist and later engineer I learned TONS out of data books, application guides and equipment manuals. I'd spend hours paging through data books, learning about the various chips, going through the application notes, building circuits, testing them and studying schematics when equipment actually came with schematics. Anyone who was "all in" in electronics did exactly the same. To this day I've kept my National Linear Applications books and a few others. eBooks have yet to capture the speed and convenience of holding a 500 page book in your hands that you can page through and explore. Worst yet, having five or six such books spread across your workbench as you work on a design. That said, having the ability to search books or, better yet, your entire library, is useful. I don't buy programming books in paper form any more. And, I still prefer PDF to any other eBook format. For me it tends to be a far better experience across platforms. This thread has made me think about the idea of digitizing my physical books. I find myself thinking about this every few months. I have both engineering and business books that will never be available in electronic form and I would definitely like to preserve them and make the searchable. Is there a service or a device one could use for this purpose. The linear book scanner seems interesting yet apparently it is known to damage books. A service could be interesting but it would have to be comparable to buying a book, meaning, $20 per book or thereabouts, not $500 (or whatever). This would mean they'd have to have a slick and low cost means to digitize books or monetize the process in some form beyond charging for digitizing. Building a scanner could be interesting, of course. I'm thinking about bringing this up as a project for the FIRST FRC robotics team I mentor. You never know what the kids might come up with. Any resources on this front?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- yourapostasy 11y agoWhen I looked into book scanning a few years ago, the Kirtas (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) was as far as I could tell from Net sources, and remains, the reference method of fast, high-volume, non-destructive, high-quality scanning. Even so, many libraries with Kirtas units still employ someone to stand watch over the page turning and ensure only one page at a time is flipped. Perfect page turning is apparently not a completely solved problem yet. If procuring (and paying nearly $10K USD per year in maintenance fees) through a hacker collective or maker space is infeasible in your area, then the community at www.diybookscanner.org have a workable solution for a much smaller subset of what the Kirtas units address, so you could look into that as a modest workaround for the time being (though I wonder what results they got for dewarping by simply taking pictures on all the sides of the scanning target to synthetically construct a 3D volume, as perfect dewarping continues to be an open and unsolved problem).
- bkrausz 11y agoIf the sole limiting factor is manual labor, can he hire a bunch of people off of Craigslist? Though I can't be there, I'd gladly donate for another person with a truck to help.
- verytrivial 11y agoBeyond the immediate rescue (which is by no means secured), perhaps someone at the Society of American Archivist or the student membership thereof would be interested? I'm seeing discussion here on HN regarding the worth of the collection and how to handle it. SAA have mailing lists[1] and there appear to be a couple of plausible Twitter handles[2]. http://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/askanarchivist-day-october-1 http://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/askanarchivist-day-oc... https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ssa+twitter+archivist https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ssa+twitter+archivist
- pmorici 11y agoPhotos and updates on the progress available on Twitter... https://twitter.com/textfiles https://twitter.com/textfiles