• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

1970 PDP10 Reference Handbook

Somewhat, but there's still a lot of "noise" in the whitespace that'd limit compression. Filtering out the noise by turning anything above a certain intensity level to pure white would work much better, and could probably be hacked up as, say, an ImageMagick script, if one cared enough to go to the trouble.

(To spitball an algorithm here: convert to grayscale -> quantize to 16 evenly-spaced shades of gray -> turn the lightest 8-12 to white. Might take some dialing in, but with high-resolution scans of plain black-'n-white text, it should work nicely.)
 
I care, Al. Even if it's a duplicate, I've run across manuals with corrupted or missing sections so it's nice to have a backup. And I'd rather see something scanned twice then tossed in a dumpster and lost forever.
 
I guess it's just unfortunate I didn't know to google "1970_PDP-10_Ref" to find it. I did a quick search and spent 15 minutes of my life scanning it and now there is a duplicate out there. It doesn't really matter. As much as I appreciate bitsavers, it does have the worst SEO imaginable.
 
bolex said:
I guess it's just unfortunate I didn't know to google "1970_PDP-10_Ref" to find it. I did a quick search and spent 15 minutes of my life scanning it and now there is a duplicate out there. It doesn't really matter. As much as I appreciate bitsavers, it does have the worst SEO imaginable.
Click to expand...
Yikes. When I want a DEC document I go to bitsavers.org, and look, for example, under: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/ for PDP10 related stuff.
That manual is literally the first line listed.
And has been for 23 years.
Who knows, maybe even longer than you have been alive.
 
czunit said:
Hello! Can we please not discourage people from saving stuff? Thank you......
Click to expand...

Hard agree. Bitsavers is my first place to look for manuals and I think I've credited them on nearly every single one of my retrocomputing projects --- it's hard to overstate how much it has enabled me to enjoy working with all kinds of computer systems. Without bitsavers my hobby wouldn't really be practical at all for so many of my old machines. I've had PERQ manuals printed and spiral-bound. I've learned Occam programming for transputers from Bitsavers. Apple Lisa manuals are at my fingertips. I wouldn't have been able to carry out this emergency Tek repair in the nick of time last week without manuals on Bitsavers. And on and on and on and on.

But not everyone knows about bitsavers, and while I don't really have a leg to stand on to say what counts as "good SEO", I suspect search engines aren't being improved with a view to helping retro hobbyists find out whether various old manuals are online. Plus, redundancy is good, and also redundancy is good. I know bitsavers is mirrored; I'm not talking about that.

People have pointed out that the manuals at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/1970_PDP-10_Ref/ have been online for 23 years. I am guessing that some of Bitsavers' practices around OCR have evolved since 2000. These manuals appear to lack embedded OCR text, and I suspect this largely accounts for why a search engine wasn't able to find it. I've found Google pointing me at components manuals in Bitsavers for part number search queries --- usually the databooks have been scanned more recently and do have the OCR data.

Anyway... I have a website I call the "Whitechapel Waiting Room" --- you can find it at http://mg-1.uk . There's some manuals relating to the Whitechapel MG-1 workstation there, plus some schematics, and ROMs for other systems that may seem Bitsavers-worthy. None of that stuff is there yet; Whitechapel Computer Works of Thatcher-era east London is unknown on bitsavers.org. But as you can see on the page, I'm not sure they're good enough --- that's why they're in the "waiting room". Some files are scans of photocopies of photocopies; others are someone else's reverse-engineered pen-and-paper drawings that seem a bit too homebrew. And so on.

They've been online for about three years now, since the deep end of the pandemic. I haven't brought them to bitsavers' attention yet because I'm afraid I'll get this business:

Al Kossow said:
"I couldn't find it anywhere else online"
You're welcome
Click to expand...

Don't need that today, haven't needed it for nearly three years. Al, if you'd like to `mkdir whitechapel`, they're there. Hope I did it good enough. I am grateful for your website and think it's almost the best thing.
 
Last edited:
Al Kossow said:
Been there for over twenty years
"I couldn't find it anywhere else online"
You're welcome
Click to expand...

Thank you Al for your amazing work collecting, archiving, preserving and scanning all the manuals, datasheets and software on Bitsavers and making them available to us all!!!
It was and is a heroic effort to achieve what you and countless contributors of material have achieved!!!
Our hobby would be infinitely harder and less rewarding without your work!!!

Thank you also to all the other people who have independently collected, archived, preserved and scanned all the manuals and software available from many other websites often complementing what is on Bitsaver, sometimes duplicating what is on Bitsavers.

Thank you also to all those who contribute on this and other forums to keep our computing history alive and help out people like me to fix and make use of our treasures.

Lets encourage this effort by all those who make our hobby possible.

A heartfelt thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
Tom
 
No question Al does an amazing job and it is a serious yeoman's work to keep up with all this stuff.

I do worry about how absolutely transitory digital repositories can be: I was on the US Electricar list for decades, then Yahoo killed the file storage space in like a month and apparently I was the only person who grabbed a copy of everything. Now it's all up on my web site (www.crystel.com/use) and if I go, it's gone. Which would kind of suck to be honest.

So redundant copies and such are a good thing. I'll take a look at how many flash files I still have that are otherwise unreadable and I think about flash based web sites that are 100% gone now. Ephemeral.
 
czunit said:
No question Al does an amazing job and it is a serious yeoman's work to keep up with all this stuff.

I do worry about how absolutely transitory digital repositories can be: I was on the US Electricar list for decades, then Yahoo killed the file storage space in like a month and apparently I was the only person who grabbed a copy of everything. Now it's all up on my web site (www.crystel.com/use) and if I go, it's gone. Which would kind of suck to be honest.

So redundant copies and such are a good thing. I'll take a look at how many flash files I still have that are otherwise unreadable and I think about flash based web sites that are 100% gone now. Ephemeral.
Click to expand...
I think there is a relatively simple way to upload everything to archive.org. I once saw a presentation from a public relation guy working for archive.org and he literally said "please, upload everything to our site"
 
thephysicist said:
I think there is a relatively simple way to upload everything to archive.org. I once saw a presentation from a public relation guy working for archive.org and he literally said "please, upload everything to our site"
Click to expand...

IDK for now I just have all my public projects on github and host my little website of PDP-11 and PDP-8 stuff thru github as well.
Figure that is the best way to preserve the stuff I did that others might find useful if I get run over by a truck tomorrow.
Does archive.org archive github.com? IDK.
Is github.com forever? IDK depends on the whims of Microsoft I guess.
 
thephysicist said:
I think there is a relatively simple way to upload everything to archive.org. I once saw a presentation from a public relation guy working for archive.org and he literally said "please, upload everything to our site"
Click to expand...
*waits for Archive.org to go bankrupt or be bought by an idiot. Oh that never happens

🍿
 
czunit said:
*waits for Archive.org to go bankrupt or be bought by an idiot. Oh that never happens

🍿
Click to expand...
If you have an account on archive.org it gives you the capability to UPLOAD content/files/folders/etc.
IDK how that works or what its capabilities or limits are, haven't used it yet.
 
I've been putting a few things on archive.org, uploads are pretty much unconditional so if the scan isn't perfect then who cares, at least it's up there.
The uploading part is easy but figuring out what the metadata you want the document to have can take a little longer. If you do an edit after an upload it asks whether you are changing the file or just the metadata, which makes for fast changes if that's all you need to alter.
My archive.org page for example is https://archive.org/details/@galasphere347
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top