Afternoon all,
Anyway, not sure if it's been done before but I had an idea
This gentleman has been doing this for quite sometime and has an excellent collection of books, magazines, instructions, and brochures for free download. He also covered Amiga, Commodore 8 Bits, and lesser computers: Atari and Apple. :-) I kid, I kid!
It also has images of the magazine discs too I believe (I could be wrong though, I've never actually looked).
The site is here:
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/You know, I believe that David's site (bombjack.org) is one of the most import sites on the Internet. David deserves so much more credit than he receives and in a historical context, he has done much to help future researchers.
About 10 years ago, I had a colleague at another university that wanted to do a paper that including 80's technology. My first thought, was that magazines such as Compute!, Byte, and Creative Computing would be the perfect resources to mine for information.
To my utter shock, we could not find an academic library that had a single copy of any of these. No matter who we contacted or where we went the story was the same: "Too many technology publications coming too fast so we had to start throwing old ones out."
Unlike some other area, technology publications came too fast and too much for anyone to archive and they just through them out. At the time, I realized that the history I grew up in, that I loved, that I felt was important in human history was just being thrown away.
I then came across another colleague that wanted to study programming from the 70's and 80's but had to abandon the project because nobody kept a copy of the software and when he did find copies he couldn't find the hardware to run them on.
We can study a manuscript that is 2500 years old but a researcher can't run software for a Mattel Aquarius that is 20 years old.
What happens in a 150 years when somebody wants to cover the birth of personal computing? I think they will be horrified at the lack of documentation, software, and hardware that will be available.
What makes David's efforts so commendable is that he is archived so much without comment. As a researcher, looking at a site like a.org isn't very useful because all the comments are subjectively biased because of history. We post about Amiga hardware in 2011.
Having magazines, books, brochures, manuals, and other documentation scanned and not modified is exactly what researchers will want.
I think many will agree here that the 70's, 80's, and 90's were a great time to live through for the birth of the personal computer. I think it is a worthy area of study for future researchers and I hope that we save as much as possible so they have the most material to study from.
Anyway, cheers!
-P
