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https://passo.uno/why-collect-read-old-computer-manuals/:
It's my ritual: every time I enter a secondhand bookshop, I go straight to the Sciences section and search for old computer manuals. They're very hard to come by, as their owners tend to throw them away once they stop using a particular device or piece of software. Manuals also happen not to be the most engaging read for most people, which adds to their rarity; few want to peruse an old IBM AS/400 handbook while laying at the beach.
Disregarding old manuals as useless piles of paper does them a grave disservice, though. Many of them are admittedly awful or outright boring, but some are ripe with forgotten tech lore and high-quality design. The writers of old manuals often enjoyed more editorial resources than tech writers are used to today, and produced handbooks and guides with greater care, because they couldn't afford gross inaccuracies to go to press.
How old is your oldest computer manual?
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday February 17 2022, @10:20AM (1 child)
Should I also keep my drivers CD that came with the motherboard? I think I even remember a floppy disk that came with my serial mouse, must be a treasure.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 18 2022, @05:56PM
I'll assume you haven't had your coffee yet. That floppy can't be read, easily anyway, and is only good for its hardware. Manuals can be read until they disintegrate with age and you can still learn from them even when the hardware is obsolete and nonfunctional.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 17 2022, @10:23AM (2 children)
It gives you time for nerdy pursuits like this one, and you don't get an earful from the wife when you fill the house old crap.
Although I have a feeling the former is a consequence of the latter...
(Score: 3, Funny) by choose another one on Thursday February 17 2022, @02:51PM (1 child)
Nah, the earful is just a consequence of being married, period.
I mean yeah, the house _is_ full of old crap, but 90% of it is _her_ old crap.
I still get an earful for not decluttering and throwing it away, obviously.
But if I _do_ throw something away I get an earful for throwing away stuff that was really important and special to her, which I should have _known_ without needing to be told, due to the fact it hadn't been taken out of the cupboard for years and was occupying an entire shelf with mold production.
And, [say it vewy quietly], to get back on topic I _do_ still get to have _some_ old crap, including (somewhere, probably double-stacked behind other stuff on a bookshelf) an early 80s copy of The Advanced User Guide for the BBC Micro, a copy of Leventhal's 6502 Assembly language programming from '81 or '82, and a stack of QUI02 tapes with a half-finished PhD thesis on them in a box in the loft.
End of the day, no one's perfect, other people ain't easy to live with, but then (i'm pretty darn sure) I ain't easy to live with either. In fact I'm not at all sure I want to find out how bad it would be to live with just me, because the impending possibility frankly scares the absolute crap out of me and there ain't no amount of vintage computer kit that will change that.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 17 2022, @07:18PM
I second this. Married, 90% of the clutter in the house is hers, yet I am often blamed for the mess. In a few cases, she wouldn't let me throw out my own clutter! More often though, it's what aboutism, zeroing on my stack of old floppy disks that take very little space compared to her piles of paper and outright trash. In an attempt to shut some of that down,
I ditched almost my entire collection of SF/Fantasy paperbacks, in favor of e-book versions. Didn't work. I just roll with it. Let her complaints go in one ear and out the other, and keep going.
Used to have a bunch more stuff, in-- where else-- my parent's home. (We didn't have a basement.) When they passed, had to clear out. I wasn't sure what was most important to save. Their magazine collections? No, the National Geographics back to the 1960s are worth little, and other magazines aren't worth anything at all. Basically, anything published should be lower priority than personal stuff. Antiques are in the middle. Debatable whether those you don't want to keep are worth the effort it takes to photograph and put up for sale online. I saved all that I could find of the correspondence they'd received over the years and stored. That is now part of my clutter. I had a bunch of Apple II computer manuals that I let go, figuring they'd be available online if I ever did want to see them again.
Another sort of item were mystery tapes. I didn't know what they were. Fortunately it wasn't hard to find out. Some were 8mm film. That was the tech of the 1960s for recording video, and among the most famous recordings in that format are those of the 1963 Kennedy assassination. Dad made them before I was born. He didn't do much-- there were only 5. Each is only 4 minutes, max, and there is no audio. I had never seen them, thanks to the playback devices having long since been stored away and forgotten, and probably deteriorated into inoperability. I ran them over to a business that specializes in restoring and digitizing, and finally got a look. Clearly, Dad had little feel for videoing, making noob kinds of mistakes that the current generation so familiar with smartphones figures out their first day with their first phone. Like, he spent 10 precious seconds filming a street sign, presumably so future viewers would know the location. But he didn't include anything with the town's name, so anyone who doesn't know where he's from will have a rough time figuring it out.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday February 17 2022, @10:53AM (2 children)
I have manuals for :
1993 Pace Modem
Windows 95 (I still have it installed on an old PC)
Winfows NT 4.0 (Compaq branded)
Peter Nortons Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC dated 1989 (I guess it is still applicable)
I only recently threw away my PC DOS (version 3) manuals.
(Score: 2) by McD on Thursday February 17 2022, @02:15PM
I have a "UNIX System V Release 2.0 User Reference Manual" from AT&T Bell Labs, October 1985.
Basically a printout of all the man pages. Many still accurate! :-)
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 18 2022, @06:02PM
Let's see... the oldest would be the TS-1000 manual from 1982. I have a fat javascript book, the TTL Cookbook, a Job Programming Language book (mainframe), I think I still have that ole NOMAD book (NOMAD is kind of like dBase for a mainframe).
I also have a lot of old hardware that needs to go to the recycler. And a functional 1997 Apple desktop that's staying.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @11:07AM (1 child)
Oldest computer books on my shelf:
- C pocket reference book from 1989 (bought in second hand store)
- HTML4 tutorial book from 1998 (from the time when web development was still innocent)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday February 18 2022, @10:11AM
Oldest manual I have: Tigerfibel, 1943. Still one of the best training manuals I've ever encountered, and it was written nearly eighty years ago.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday February 17 2022, @11:14AM (4 children)
For a lot of early software, especially from the DOS era and earlier, a manual may be the only way to operate a piece of software.
Keyboard command layout, command line syntax, explanations of limitations and features, or even what the vendor though was special about their software compared to others. You may not find that without the manual.
This information would not have fit on the floppy disk. And even if it had, professionals buying software to run their business didn't want to squint at some tiny little green screen to learn about their new system - printed manuals were, and still are, easier to read. Or get stuck unable to read help files because the software would not load in the first place.
Manuals were an important part of retail packages. Read any old software review in infoworld or byte magazine and how well the manual is written is always part of that. (not to mention good tech support, which we also don't get these days)
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday February 17 2022, @02:54PM (1 child)
Don't forget the old copy protection schemes too - halfway through the game please type in the third word on the fifth line of page 17 of the manual. to continue..
From the days when photocopying the manual was way more expensive than buying a new copy of the software.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 17 2022, @03:19PM
Or when they made photocopying impractical by printing the codes in black ink on a maroon background.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @04:33PM
Real men don't read manuals! 'nuf said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @11:10PM
WordPerfect and some other enterprise software we used came with differently sized keyboard overlays so you knew what key combos did the different special operations. Without knowing the proper chords, it was almost impossible to figure out how to do what.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Acabatag on Thursday February 17 2022, @11:36AM
I have an original BSD 4.4 manual set. Also a GNU Emacs manual from the 80s. And a few of my fathers old books. He started at IBM in 1956. I don't have the manual contents but I have a notebook cover from when he programmed the IBM 650.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by agr on Thursday February 17 2022, @11:37AM (2 children)
When I was a kid in the early 1960s and got interested in computers, you could write to IBM asking for manuals and they would send them to you for free. I still have a box of old manuals, including ones for the IBM 709, 1401, 7070, 1130 and an early System/360 Principles of Operation. Many date back to the late 1950s. They were very well written and produced and set a standard for the industry. Some even had instructions for wiring plugboards in peripherals that were based on older accounting machines. I remember when the first IBM PC came out and it had a manual that was up to IBM snuff. These days a microprocessor that sells for under a dollar can have an online data sheet that has more pages than an old IBM mainframe manual. Bitsavers has many old IBM manuals available on line and they are worth a look.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @12:11PM
I have the old IBM AT technical reference manuals where they actually included a hard copy of the source code of the BIOS as well as schematics of the hardware.
That was when Microsoft/IBM/Intel was establishing market dominance against the likes of Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation.
Once domination was established, and laws in place to protect strangleholds, things changed fast.
I don't think anyone knows how all this stuff works anymore.
At one time, I thought I had a chance at understanding it well enough to create any software or hardware I might need...but those days are long gone. The Arduino is the only modern computer architecture I understand at that level.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 17 2022, @03:21PM
The IBM Principles of Operation was a classic in terms of competent, concise, precise technical writing. I haven't seen the like in years.
(Score: 1) by Nofsck Ingcloo on Thursday February 17 2022, @12:32PM (1 child)
Maybe I only marginally qualify to post this because I had to let them go a year ago when I downsized my living arrangements. But until then I had manuls for the IBM 650, the Burroughs 220, the IBM 1401, and the IBM 1410. And my SOAP deck!
1984 was not written as an instruction manual.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday February 17 2022, @08:34PM
You can google or DDG anything these days.
http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/650man/ [piercefuller.com]
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @12:38PM (2 children)
Now I troll the web looking for bits and pieces of information. Productivity is much lower than in the old days.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @12:51PM
Soon we'll be foraging for scraps in a burnt wasteland. Productivity will skyrocket through the floor. The remaining technical manuals will be used for kindling during the winter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @03:10PM
And... have to watch a complete youtube video... to find out that the information you're looking for isn't in there.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday February 17 2022, @01:20PM
The only cool manual I recall is from my old Tandy 1000EX. I remember seeing the pin-out for the proprietary card-edge connector for the parallel/printer port in it and thinking how cool it would be if I made an adapter for that for a printer. I was 11 or 12 I think, and making that little db25 adapter felt like nuclear rocket surgery. :)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @01:29PM
Modernity for the sake of modernity is bad practice.
Most women do not understand value and so will go for modern in order to look good among their friends. The group supports itself, checking who has the latest piece of hardware poorly made in China. Peer pressure makes them disregard old technology, books, ideas. Women are rarely known to own libraries.
Behind this practice of throwing away old books is the jew. This is so the jew can rewrite history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @01:57PM
I have a complete Osborne 1 with disks and manuals stashed somewhere on the attic. That'd put it at around 1981-1983, not sure if I have older stuff but there might be some Fortran manuals...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Thursday February 17 2022, @02:22PM (1 child)
I have a whole pile of textbooks covering such topics as MSFC (MIcrosoft Foundation Classes), Samba, Windows 2000 etc from 1995 to 2005'ish. No use to anybody nowadays I guess, including me. I suppose I should take them to be recycled at the dump but I feel that there must be someone, somewhere, who would enjoy them. I just haven't found him or her yet. I dread to think how much they all cost back in the day.
I have still got some motherboard manuals from the same era but they are in a box amongst lots of other boxes - and I am not going to dig them out today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @04:47PM
It's all just garbage now. Feel free to use the pages to start wood fires or just chuck into the trashcan. Information has a lifespan, and your books are long past it. This ain't Shakespeare.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday February 17 2022, @03:45PM
I have all the TRS-80 manuals plus the technical reference manual, circa 1979. Also still have the TRS-80, monitor, expansion interface, and 2 disk drives.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Thursday February 17 2022, @04:39PM
I have manuals for JCL/360 and System/360 assembly among my ten cases or so of computer books. Also really early stuff on Unix (pre SVR4), DEC PDP systems, COBOL, Lisp (1.5, Common Lisp, CLOS, COLORS), SNOBOL4, Fortran, etc. Also a few books on building things with TTL and RTL circuits which is closely contemporary to some of that stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kreuzfeld on Thursday February 17 2022, @04:48PM
Right here next to me is the full box set of Broderbund's "Ancient Art of War at Sea" game, including the original floppies and the 124pp manual. Over fifty pages are just historical background on the age of fighting sail. Those were the days!
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday February 17 2022, @05:02PM (1 child)
I sold and threw out all that stuff. Paper products and the glues used in them are just mold and bug food in high-humidity environments. Hell, anything but gold plated plugs only last about 6mo - 1 yr.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @06:24PM
You don't run an air conditioner? Dehumidifier?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 17 2022, @05:31PM
Somewhere, probably in storage, I have a manual for Intercom 1000, an interpreted programming language for the Bendix g-15d.
That was a computer whose main memory was on a magnetic drum.
The "high-level" interpreted language resembled a conventional machine language. two-digit opcodes and numerical addresses.
No assembly language -- the machine didn't do alphabetic I/O. Just hexadecimal.
The university got the machine (I think) in 1957; I encountered it in 1963.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday February 17 2022, @05:56PM
Sperry Univac UP-8203 Rev.2 Update B
OS/3 System
90/25, 90/30, 90/30 B, 90/40 Data Processing System
Hardware and Software Summary
About 300 pages total in this summary.
It's everything what was necessary for actual system programming (that's what you call hacking today), microcoding, BAL assembler, mnemonics, physical IOCS, channel status words, control words, peripheral hardware command codes, supervisor symbionts invocation, control blocks formats, operator console system commands, JCL.
Bare minimum. This is no Programmer's Reference though, those were huge, you had to know and understand everything in detail beforehand to use this Summary efficiently. And no Structured Assembler (SAL), no languages compilers in this document.
Yes, with knowledge from this one, it was possible to load microcode from punch cards reader to boot a completely new instruction set and operating system you may have invented in house.
Even technicians used their own microcoded instruction set for diagnostics this way.
The machine had two standard microcode ISAs: native 90/30 and funny IBM/360-compatible.
OS/3 Operating System was written by Grace Hopper herself, in SAL (Structured Assembler). Structured Assembler was conceptually equivalent to Pascal, it was possible to translate later Pascal programs directly into SAL. No need for funny unsafe compilers, like C. Most of our programmers used Structured Assembler instead of Cobol or Fortran too.
More, the system came with her complete source code, for it was necessary to re-generate it when hardware configuration changed significantly, such as channels added to the machine. I did this sysgen more than once.
I learned all my assembler way of thinking about later machines by reading this Hopper's masterpiece code.
-----
Why American demolished their own perfectly working technology of Apollo Project Age, erased it from history completely and replaced it with a lot inferior IBM/360 commercial platform is far beyond my understanding and any rational explanation.
They lost.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @06:21PM
The oldest one? "A short course of mathematical machines" (quite rough translation) by Boris Delaunay, from 1950s. Yes, this Delaunay, known from triangulation. The story of this book is quite interesting - he wrote it as a help for a cycle of university lectures about mechanical calculators. However very shortly this book became something like "everything you want to know about mechanical calculators but you are afraid to ask". Copies of this book were used as a general manual in many offices with mechanical calculators, and was definitely a must-go in office equipment repair shops.
And the strangest one is from early 1960s. It is a manual of more-or-less programmable industrial automation system made using a few hundreds of logic elements. All of them are hydraulic.
There is one important thing: Early software, especially CP/M software, was very unintuitive. It needed printed manuals, even the text editor needed it. Introduction of WS, in which half of the screen was covered with help menu and the second half was for edited text, was a revolution. Today we have similar not intuitive software in Unix distributions, but only because most of its users just got used to the software and remember large parts of its usage.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17 2022, @10:15PM (1 child)
That thing was amazing. It may have been the last time that it was possible to document a CPU and its ancillary chips in one readable book. Even as a teen I noticed something odd about it--it was like they were selling me the machine in the manual. I don't know if this was because sales engineers had been tasked with writing it or what. Part of me would always think, "quit selling. I already own it", but then the flip side of that was that it seemed to convey an enthusiasm for the product and somehow made it easier to read about things that might have otherwise been a bit dry.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday February 18 2022, @05:32AM
I owned one of those machines too. Absolutely elegant architecture. Was it the first commonly available RISC machine?
That machine made me fall in love with the Rockwell 65C02, as I could design very elegant software/hardware designs using Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" ideas interfacing directly to memory. I could build simple things that did a lot of things yet required very little power. The CMOS EEPROM of the day made for robust deployments that did not corrupt in the field.
I miss those days. These days, I have to coexist with so much stuff I do not know how it works. And it shows. It's got to where I hate to build anything for anyone else, as I just disappoint them if I use the old tech I understand. Why use an Arduino if I can use a PC with lots of proprietary software?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 18 2022, @01:15AM
Newest MacAir just came with a card, guess you could collect those.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday February 18 2022, @01:17AM (3 children)
Right in the shelf behind me, a precious original of "MC6809 Preliminary Programming Manual", First Edition, MOTOROLA, INC. 1979. A customer of mine actually built their own computers as medical device terminals back in the 80s, they used the 6809 for that and in early devices. After that gear was years out of maintenance they once cleaned up and were nice enough to declare the pile of rubble up for grabs.
So I got this truly vintage manual (retrocomputing porn...), but, of much more interest, the set of books for QuickDraw GX. By now, these are fortunately available as PDF, but back then, iirc, they weren't. They are important, because they show how a 2D graphics library is done right, something no one has ever pulled off elsewhere, in terms of cleanliness and completeness.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 18 2022, @04:18AM (2 children)
And while this obsolete information may seem like trash... consider its value should civilization fall apart, and our descendants have to claw themselves back from the ashes. You can start over from mechanical gates, if you have the knowhow handy. You can't start over from what needs a silicon fab facility.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday February 18 2022, @03:39PM (1 child)
Your reply got me thinking a bit about the post-apocalypse, and I had a look around if there was any realistic sci-fi on the topic. I found leads to "The Postman" and "Earth Abides", but with their cult and nature themes, they appear deeper into the fantasy realm than "Mad Max". Mad Max as scenario is, by the way, mentioned in Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge", which seems to be the most interesting book on the topic. I doesn't look that Dartnell goes farther than crystal rectifiers and vacuum triodes, as far as electronics is concerned. We would be more interested in getting semiconductor manufacturing restarted.
In a realistic post-apocalypse, there would be an abundance of pre-apocalyptic things to be found, and finding them wouldn't be as exciting as delving for artifacts in "Made in Abyss" (んなあ!), but more or less an ordinary mining operation, with de-soldering processes like they are done today by children in Africa.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 18 2022, @05:19PM
Yeah. Mad Max is a bit stylized, but probably closer to the reality of civilizational collapse in the urban areas, and the survivors on the fringes. Earth Abides is probably closer to the likely rural remains. As you say, once the remaining tech began to give out, a lot of it would be basically landfill-mining for raw materials, as being a helluva lot easier than hardrock mining and refining. The richest man in the area would be the local scrapyard operator.
Book looks interesting, thanks for the reference.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 18 2022, @02:49AM
OK, you read old computer manuals...but why are the pages stuck together?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday February 18 2022, @06:23AM (1 child)
1986
I don't win :(
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 18 2022, @05:21PM
I think I've got some from about 1979 here somewhere, and that's still embarrassingly modern!
The oldest *interesting* ones I've got are a complete set of manuals for Borland Turbo C, originally the property of one Bob Null. 1988??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 18 2022, @10:17AM
The oldest computer manuals I have are for the BBC Micro, so 1982 or thereabouts. Some modern printouts of older Acorn machines and circuit diagrams, too.
In the broader sense of textbooks and datasheets, I've got some older stuff. I've a book on "Basic Power Engineering" dated 1977, and a copy of the TI TTL Data Book from 1976.
I've got a full set of the SMP Advanced Mathematics (Metric Edition) from 1970, these are textbooks developed for teaching A-level Maths in UK high schools. Book 3 has a chapter on programming - even though no high school would have a computer in the 1970s - and appendices on Algol and Fortran. The series as a whole take a rigorous, in-depth approach to mathematics that is very different in style to modern teaching.
My very oldest textbook would be a Victorian-era printing of Euclid's elements. which I've recently mislaid (so can't check the date).
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Friday February 18 2022, @02:23PM (1 child)
Many of the old woodworking books from before machines were essential in reviving hand tool woodworking.
Workers would go through an apprenticeship and there were guilds that kept the knowledge from others.
Chris Schwarz has researched and brought much of this to light. In addition to publishing new books (Lost Art Press), he's reprinted some of the older ones. Roubo's book(s) are from the 1700s and Nicholson was slightly later.
For making 1 or 2 of an item (like hobbyist woodworkers), hand tools are often faster. Many machine tool techniques require jigs and you need the 1st cut to be perfect.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 18 2022, @05:25PM
Wow, neat, Great to see the methods preserved.
In the spirit of preserving what came before, see also Engels Coach Shop on YT.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Sunday February 20 2022, @09:20PM
Been in this business since 91, and I tend not to throw books away. Before google, you hsd to have a very complete library to solve problems.