capturing legacy documentation

At 12:10 AM 6/3/97 -0400, Mr. Self Destruct wrote: perhaps it is time for this group to stand up and begin to truly capture the history and documentation of classic computing - and to do it on line. for starters this means capturing manuals which are all too often lost first. next (and more challenging legally) is software. we could use some solid legal advice on what can and can't be posted but i find it hard to believe that anyone could object to putting scanned-in versions of most older manuals on the internet since: 1) many of these companies are no longer in the business, and 2) even if they were they would probably themselves make such a service available or welcome a third party to do it. i think all we really would have to do is make sure the original copyright notification was preserved in the on-line version. i realize system software is a tougher issue but perhaps we could start with the manuals. so we would need a home location (Bill Whitson: how about the "Archives" section of the classic computer web page you've set up? http://weber.u.washington.edu/~bcw/ccl.html) and some folks with scanners who can get things into HTML format (and others? .doc? .pdf?) and upload. comments on this proposal? are there already similar archives out there? - (i know of some Commodore ones), if so we should point to them. I'm not aware of any one location to go to find classic computer documentation, and judging from the traffic on this list it's sorely needed. - glenn +=========================================================+ | Glenn F. Roberts, Falls Church, VA | Comments are my own and not the opinion of my employer | groberts(a)mitre.org