[TriLUG] Any value in decades old mainframe manuals and printouts?

[William Sutton]

used punch cards, as long as they're still somewhat rigid, are never 
useless.  they make very nice bookmarks.

William Sutton

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Peter Neilson wrote:

> Don Hammond wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Today's trash is tomorrow's antiques.
>
> The computer museum, once in Boston but now somewhere on the left coast, 
> would know what's valuable. Generally stuff like that gets tossed, and 
> finally there's only a tiny bit of interest by a few people. Then much later 
> the historians come along, and say, "You tossed out THAT? How could 
> you?!!???"
>
> The mechanical musical instrument folks (player pianos and such) now devote 
> substantial effort to finding and restoring some of the rarer equipment for 
> reading data from what's essentially 65-channel and 88-channel paper tape. 
> Purists want to hear the original instruments play. Electronics junkies try 
> to make MIDI files instead, often with less than astounding results. I've got 
> about 6000 piano rolls myself, and I'm not about to chuck any out, 
> /especially/ not the ones that are nearly shredded from being "played to 
> death," because the music was so good. Conversely, rolls with dreary hymns 
> are usually in pristine shape. Fortunately the information is digital, and 
> thus copying (hand-punching holes in new paper) is feasible. I've done it.
>
> Long ago I threw out a couple dozen boxes of IBM cards that I had used on the 
> 1620. Now /those/ were useless!
>
> Moral: There is someone out there who desperately wants your brother's stuff. 
> Especially the "worthless" parts.
>
> PS: There was, so I heard, an antiques shoppe on Cape Cod named, "Grandma Had 
> One Of Those And She Threw It Away."
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