The Computer Archive


About the Computer Archive

This site is simply a collection of materials preserved by making them widely available. The Main Archive contains scanned literature, documentation, manuals and files cover vintage microcomputers, electronics, typewriters and anything else I have or have interest in. The future Serial Type Database will be an interactive site to browse typefaces used by and available for typewriters and character printers.6

The Main Archive
 

The main repository of computer and technological literature, catalogs, magazines and documentation.

Serial Type Database
 

Not implemented yet! A future repository of typewriter typefaces from manual, impact to electronic, as well as some character-based computer printers. (No host CPU generated typefaces.)

Redistribution and Usage Rules

Materials here are generally freely downloadable and can be re-posted on other sites or used as needed. A reference to this site would be nice. Just please do not waste my bandwidth and do not grab files using multiple threads.

If you are selling something, including a copy or link to the original literature, photos or other content here is a great sales tool! That said, if you have a mostly for-profit site (including auctions) that benefits from the materials, especially the original content, you are encouraged to find a way to support this site in your own way.

Everyone is welcome to help by donating content, materials, supplies and vintage equipment are all good ideas. I don't have a way to accept monitary donations; it you really wish to participate in this manner, communicate with me.

Background

The initial seed for the archive was the literature that I happened to keep in running my business. Rather than put it all into recycling, I figured that scanning and posting it would make it of some benefit to all, whether for research or trips down memory lane. You can tell it is more business and personal computer oriented and less on the games front.

Organization is always subject to change but this is the basic idea:

I'm continuing to use a flat-bed scanner which I still prefer versus the camera based ones that I've tried.

January 2022: I finally found a super-duper scanner, the Fujitsu fi-6770A. It performs 11x17 scans on both the flatbed (about 1.5 seconds for a letter page at 400 dpi) and duplex sheet fed (90 pages per minute, 180 counting both sides.)

Contact

I am your friendly Computer Archive SysOp: Thumper

My email address is my SysOp name at/on this web site domain.

What's happening

Now that I have the Fujitsu scanner, I'm going to try to devote some time to scanning again, hence the web site update. The site still needs a few more things but I'm keeping it super duper simple.

Recently I've been playing with my typewriters more. I'm compilng standardized typeface and print samples, have already written a program to process these samples and want to make a browsable database of these samples. I'm also scanning a few typewriter manuals and such.

In the future, I want to add a bunch of files from a BBS but I need to consider my hosting and am going back-and-forth on that. One other area is to build a list of links to related sources, something that is easy to maintain.


2022.02.03   I'll probably just use a simple HTML table for the news, at least for now.

Main Archive works. The others don't -- they all link to the same place.

2022.02.02   The Computer Archive is under reconstruction. The goal is to get back to a blog format similar to the original site that a previous host deleted without warning due to the bandwidth the site used.

Okay, the content is accessable. I'm using a new file viewer and all the content should be there. I'm hoping to find a way to generate automatic PDF thumbnails.

After I get this to a settled state, I'll start to figure out how to put a basic blog on here without all of the overhead of WordPress. I just want something super simple so we'll just have to see how that turns out.