Is there a use for old tech books & manuals?

[Kevin]

Our office is in the midst of cleaning out all of our work areas as we prepare to relocate our group to a different location. As we go through our years (15 years in my case) of stuff there is an abundance of old tech books & manuals that will be likely thrown in the recycle bin. I am talking about stuff like guides for Visual Basic 6, early versions of Visual Studio .Net, Unix guides (yes, Unix, not Linux ), and various sorted other technology that is still in use out there but in very limited numbers.

Does anybody know of a use for them other than just chucking them in the recycle bin? Any organizations out there that might have a need for them?

With a lot of these originally going for $50 & up, it seems such a shame to just dispose of them if there is the slightest chance somebody might be able to use them.

 

[Edgar J Hoover]

Well for example, the last original engineer to work on Voyager 1 and 2 has now just retired.

Larry Zottarelli, aged 80, left NASA's employ this week after 55 years on the job. Zottarelli helped to develop Voyager's on-board computers and has worked on the mission since 1975. CNNreports that he was sent on his way with a handshake from actress Nichelle Nicholls, Star Trek's Lt. Uhura.

Consequently, should NASA need to modify the code on the flight computer, they are now stuffed. How many IT guts do you know who are fluent in FORTRAN, Algol and assembly language for the Voyagers' 250 KHz General Electric 18-bit TTL CPUs, complete with single register accumulator and bit-serial access to 2096-word plated-wire RAM.

All knowledge is useful, even old knowledge.

A company i worked for 10 years ago had there accounting system on an ancient system - it was a DEC Minicomputer (the old sort, that sat i na 19 inch rack with huge removable disc drives, a card reader and a teletype). The user screens were green screen terminals, and the whole thing was written in some utterly obscure programming language of which, ten years ago, ther was only two retired guys alive who knew anything about it, who had to be bribed with enormous amounts of money to come over for the day to write a patch.. I should think by now they are dead, and the company is well screwed the next time it falls over.

 

[Tom]

One thing I understand is that industry is always changing. To be on top of all the new changes is a desired quality often sought in employment. But... I also know that industry tends to leave behind many working models still in operation. In the auto mechanic world there are many professional auto mechanics that have no idea how to tune an engine that has points. There are professional electronics repairmen that have no idea how an old tube radio works. Old tech manuals are worth keeping if you find an application for them.

 

[Edgar J Hoover]

Indeed, i grew up eating and breathing electronics. I started out building valve radios at age 10 and by the time id gone off into Computing i was building TTL logic controlled programmable disco light displays. Some the reference books had I had, such as valve pin layout references books, transistor pin books, TTL pin layouts, fetch a lot of money on ebay.

Even old bits of kit - Oscilloscopes, for example. Good ones fetch huge money.

 

[Kevin]

All knowledge is useful, even old knowledge.

True but in this case most tech guides for recent environments (programming languages, etc.) can be found online in digital format. It's only when you've been for 24 hours, your location has no internet connection, and you've got a deadline that you realize the importance of a printed book. (Yes, I've been there.)

Unfortunately I couldn't find a home for the books and the weight of them made it financially prohibitive to ship out them for free to anybody who might've wanted them and we head to clear out of the old location so... in the recycle bin they went.

Below is a pic of what part of my desk looked like while cleaning out my old office. In the bottom-left is an old ANSI COBOL standards book and is one of the few that I kept. I've had it in my collection going back to 1988; my days of COBOL programming are (hopefully) way behind me but it has some sentimental value to me as it was given to me when I started my first programming job out of high school. Plus, if nothing else, a tech guide in a hard-back is not exactly common these days.

 

[Edgar J Hoover]

Ah , i started off writing COBOL 66 and FORTRAN 77, before venturing into various PC machine codes, then such lofty heights as dBase2, ORACLE and later Visual Basic, Pascal and C++. I even had to make it up as i went along in MUMPS once.

My first coding job: the Boss threw an A3 fanfold printout of the wages program, and I was told to trim 50 milliseconds off the main loop execution time....

I even still have a 1976 ASCII A3 Fanfold Snoopy Calendar carefully preserved for posterity....