[TriLUG] Any value in decades old mainframe manuals and printouts?
Don Hammond
trilug at tradersdata.com
Mon Jul 27 11:23:25 EDT 2009
I'm cleaning up and going through boxes and boxes of manuals and
printouts that my late brother saved, and trying to figure out if
there's any value to them. By value, I mean research, historical
collection, curiosity, reminiscing, etc., not monetary.
They seem to be early to mid 70's through early to mid 80's. I believe
they're all from work he did with IBM mainframes. A lot of them look
like work product in various stages of development, so I'd guess are
of no value. But there are also printouts of documentation. It
appears to me that he did work (or experimented) on mainframes with
Fortran, Snobol, Pascal, Cobol, and probably others, and he printed
out a lot of documentation from Introductions/Overviews to syntax.
There are also code listings, but I can't tell if they're his or
samples that go with the documentation. I also have a handful of mag
tapes, although I seriously doubt they're readable, even if I had a way.
There are also a dozen or more boxes of "official" printed manuals,
again all apparently IBM mainframe stuff of the same vintage. I've
contacted someone I know at IBM to see if they have any ideas for
finding someone there who can express interest, or not, in the manuals.
This probably seems a bit odd. Without getting bogged down in the
emotions of jettisoning a loved ones possessions, I'd feel great if it
turned out some piece of this had some value to someone. And I'd feel
better to put out this feeler and get (considered, please) "no it's
crap" responses, than to throw it all away and wonder.
Thanks for any ideas.
Don Hammond
P.S. If this stirs anyone's interest, there is a lot of stuff beyond
that described above. He was a researcher at heart, and I have all
kinds of material on probably at least a dozen languages that he
played with on his own, theoretical papers (from operating system
design to programming languages and concepts) back to the 60's, and
who knows what else. In his later years, smalltalk was his thing, but
he had his fingers on an amazing array of things. If you have a
historical itch for something specific, I'd be pleased to look for
anything that might scratch it. Off-list is fine with me.
P.P.S. There is nothing Commodore related as far as I've found.
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