The Computer Archive About the Archive

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!

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 good ideas, but I can provide my PayPal address if you want to make a donation that way to help cover the hosting bills, equipment and time.

Organization

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

• Product literature is organized by product type when it is about a specific product (or group of products).
• Manuals are organized by company name. As this group grows, I may implement an A, B, C ... folder system.
• Typewriter stuff is organized by print samples with photos of the machine in a sub-folder of each print sample. There are / will be typewriter manuals organized by company plus a few "analysis" PDFs.

About and Building the Archive

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.

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.)

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.