I'm reminded a bit of "A Canticle for Leibowitz"!

On 21/07/2019 06:48, Paul Birkel via cctalk wrote: Thank you for the reference. Sci-fi and science fiction are very broad genres that I don't have any particular active fondness for. I want to explore these genres more deeply because I am probably not looking in the places, or not looking in the right way. I like elements of the supernatural and elements of mysticism. I particularly like explorations of character development and relationships as much I like "sci-" or "science". Please could you (Paul or anybody else on this list) recommend a forum or mailing list for fans of sci-fi or science fiction? I'm sure there are many but I've no idea where to start. I would be very grateful. Thank you!! Andrew -- OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9

At 01:48 AM 21/07/2019 -0400, Paul Birkel wrote: Indeed. Complicating factors are: * Technical artifacts/documents can be essential tools, required to maintain other things, of either interest, or actual critical dependencies of activities. * The boundary of what tech items are *important* can shift depending on large scale economic/cultural events. In certain potentially possible future scenarios, they may shift a *lot*. Someone jokingly mentioned the 'John Titor searching for a specific old computer' legend, but such scenarios (minus the time travel) are quite conceivable. * As opposed to cultural items, tech items have an extra attribute: still works or not. Which is very important. Unless they are demonstrably working, understanding of their functions and use can become mythologised, and lose veracity and context. These are much less likely to apply to purely cultural artefacts. No one is going to die, or starve, or whatever, if say the Mona Lisa was lost. I recommend a book "The collapse of complex societies" by Tainter. Even if the digital version _did_ fully capture the information content, I strongly dispute that the physical item/document has lost it's value. That 'digital is all we need' viewpoint is a trap for the naive, because: 1. No one can ever fully trust the validity of any digital work. Trusting such things to be 'true' demonstrates a foolish assumption that there are no hostile actors, who'd ever wish to deceive and mislead. (Shows a collossal blindness to historical reality, and contemporary politics.) 2. Relying on digital records assumes that the human race will never have any kind of 'technical interruption', in which digital storage hardware can't be maintained, with the necessary continual refreshing and updating. Ever tried to get a 20 year old hard disk going and recover the data? _Sometimes_ it's possible, if it was stored in perfect conditions. Flash memory, EPROMS, CDs, DVDs, etc, all are ephemeral. Now we get to a critical point. There's no chance of defining any specific cutoff criteria. It's a question on which everyone will always differ. And this is why 'centralization is bad.' If remaining technical historical artefacts/books are allowed to be gathered into central archives, then it's only a matter of time before those items will be destroyed. Accidents, deliberate subversion, stupidity, financial upsets, natural disasters... But most often by some official unilaterally deciding 'these items are not worth preserving.' Museums are OK, and it's good to make things publicly viewable, but only if there are _many_. The best way to preserve any kind of history (tech or cultural) is for the physical items to remain many and well distributed among private individuals who value them. Then even in the event of some kind of widespread pogrom (not inconceivable with today's insane Leftist herd mentality developments) there will be people who quietly preserve things. In such times any kind of public museum/library institutions are toast. (And btw my wife lived through the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia, don't argue with me on this one. Or I will tell you some stories that will give you nightmares.) The necessity to preserve multiple redundancy, is why destroying a hardcopy of a 'rare-ish' manual in order to scan it, is so bad. Especially when the tendency to do that has become widespread, so there's a high rate of attrition of whatever do remain in private hands. There can never be such a registry, and even to try making one would be unwise since it just creates a 'burn list' for anyone who decided to wipe parts of history. The term 'last known survivor' is short hand for 'Gee I can't find any references to others of this item/book.' There probably are some, just not visible. And that's as it should be. For eg I have a quite old book, that a specific national group would greatly prefer did not exist. Since it destroys a foundation of their lying political narative. There is ONE reference I can find to another copy, and that's in the stack of a major public library. It's one of the top items on my 'to scan' list, once I have the capability to scan fat books without damaging them. In the meantime, it shall remain nameless. Others may have copies. No way to tell. I have to assume that my copy might be, or become, the last. Like Art. One knows it when it is encountered. A totally personal call. And this is good, because it preserves diversity of content. Well you should take that up with your great-great-great grandchildren, when they want to know what today's tech (and its manuals) were really like. A great story. But also an example of how off the rails a single institution can go, in terms of preserving information about technology. Without working examples. BTW. I have three IBM 026 card punch machines as a future restoration project. But can I find a service manual? No. None online, only one for the later 028. And even if there was a PDF I expect it would be the usual terrible quality. Does anyone have a physical copy they would sell? Or as my last resort, loan? Ditto for a service/schematics manual for the Documation TM200 punch card reader. No copy can be found. Guy

. . . and does it FULLY capture the information content. One might think so, but much later, somebody asks, "in the number on page 576, is that a '3' or an '8'?" There is always the possibility of a need to go back to prior, or even original forms.

Many arguments are actually based on inadequaate definition of terms. Two people who might actually agree argue based on having different definitions. For example, cutting the spine off of a book can definitely be considered to be DAMAGING the artifact. But do we want to consider that "DESTROYING"?

Certainly landfilling once something is scanned is "DESTROYING" (although what was the final result of the landfill salvage of those game cartridges?) But putting the book back on a shelf, without its spine?

That may seriously damage cultural aspects, but not necessarily the informational value. And, admittedly, there can be some corner cases, such as if slicing off the binding lost notes scribbled in the margins by an important prior owner.

Oh, and when you die, your executor may be quick to discard all of those unbound books. When I die, contact my sister, bring a skip, and offer to do all of the hauling for her at a lower rate than any of the commercial services charge. At some point, most collections end up in the hands of "administrators" with no appreciation for the materials. "And, it is certainly not worth the cost to keep all of this crap!"

Another example to keep bringing up - BBC did not think that there would be any further need of the already aired Dostor Who episodes, and could reuse the tape. Besides, "some other department has copies of all of them". There's 100 episodes for which NO copies have been found. It's a big deal when a 16mm B&W print is found in a shed in the outback, or even home 8mm movies of the living room TV screen.

BTW. I have three IBM 026 card punch machines as a future restoration project. But can I find a service manual? No. None online, only one for the later 028. And even if there was a PDF I expect it would be the usual terrible quality. Does anyone have a physical copy they would sell? Or as my last resort, loan? Ditto for a service/schematics manual for the Documation TM200 punch card reader. No copy can be found.

Guy

On Jul 21, 2019, at 12:16 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: On 07/21/2019 05:16 AM, Joseph S. Barrera III via cctalk wrote: Most of the text of these documents don't need super high resolution. But, some contain hand-drawn schematics where an 11 x 17 original has been shrunk to 8.5 x 11" and hand-written signal labels and part types are VERY small. These need to be scanned at high resolution, with several retries while adjusting the image threshold to make things readable.

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Paul Koning via cctalk Sent: 24 July 2019 01:30 To: Jon Elson <elson at pico-systems.com>; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: Scanning question (Is destruction of old tech docs a moral crime?) > On Jul 21, 2019, at 12:16 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk

wrote: But, some contain hand-drawn schematics where an 11 x 17 original has been shrunk to 8.5 x 11" and hand-written signal labels and part types are VERY small. These need to be scanned at high resolution, with several retries while adjusting the image threshold to make things readable. Another example that might call for higher than normal resolution is

text, where subtle distinctions need to be visible. An example of this

found in the scans in the Knuth archive of the THE operating system

Those are line printer listings printed with a typical medium-worn ribbon

that's bad enough. But the printer is upper case only printing mixed-case source material. That was handled in that OS by overprinting upper case letters with periods. In a clean original printout that's easy enough to

but the scans seem to be about 300 dpi and with that the overprints are often not easy to see. Since the source text is case sensitive this can

problem... paul

I'd suggest that in 2019 when bits are cheap and high-quality scanners nearly as cheap, "crappy quality digital image" is a bit of a straw man. Yes, I've seen plenty of barely-readable or practically unreadable scans, but they were made years or decades ago. What dpi qualifies as not "crappy"? 300dpi? 400? 600?

wrote: > I'm posting a private email (anonymized) and my reply because it's a > significant issue. > >{Note private reply} > > > > When the scanning process involves destruction of the original work the > > > last one, then destroying it now just to produce a digital copy > > > inadequate to the aims of cultural preservation - that's a crime. > > > One right up there with genocide > > >While I agree that making a non-optimal digital copy in such cases, is, > >well, non-optimal (because for _many uses_, the basic information is still it's > >seriously defective. > > > [name removed] > I agree that when historical documents are lost without even any kind of > digital copy made, that's the worst. > However I was pretty careful to preceded that quoted paragraph with > conditionals. > Specifically referring to a case where someone has a rare work, that isn't to gone. > That's criminal. A high level crime against humankind. Where it's done in > bulk to entire collections, it _is_ the cultural equivalent of genocide. > I don't care if you disagree. > Could it be that you are upset because you do this (destroy docs), and > don't > like to be accused of being a criminal? > I am sure that the future WON'T take your position on this. They are going have > left is crappy quality horrible-looking two-tone scans. > This is _already_ the case with many electronics instrument manuals. There > are > so many people who think that the physical manuscript is unimportant, and > nothing > matters other than posting a minimally readable smallest-possible-file > online, > with the least effort and so it's OK to destroy the original for > convenience. > Private reply noted. Still going to repost on the list, as from anon. > Guy

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 11:41 AM Warner Losh via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I don't know about the ScanSnap specifically, but I suspect that 1200dpi mode may be interpolated, not true optical 1200. In either case, I've rarely seen any great benefit to using >600, at least on any scanner I've used (my main workhorse now being a Fujitsu fi-5750C).

On Sun, 21 Jul 2019, Jason T via cctalk wrote: It's like the difference between laser printing and real typesetting. 'course many people can't see the difference. Below 2400dpi, the characters in the text are not as smooth. Even 300DPI scans of 300DPI are unlikely to be lined up, to keep from getting degradation.

although at 300dpi on? HP laser-jet 3 there were variable? sizes? dots? giving better? curve? fit. a? great selling feature! Made? me $$ (grin)! Ed# In a message dated 7/21/2019 12:13:14 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at classiccmp.org writes: It's like the difference between laser printing and real typesetting. 'course many people can't see the difference. Below 2400dpi, the characters in the text are not as smooth

although at 300dpi on? HP laser-jet 3 there were variable? sizes? dots? giving better? curve? fit. a? great selling feature! Made? me $$ (grin)! Ed# In a message dated 7/21/2019 12:13:14 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at classiccmp.org writes: It's like the difference between laser printing and real typesetting. 'course many people can't see the difference. Below 2400dpi, the characters in the text are not as smooth

I just scanned my Rainbow 100 User's Manual at 300, 600 and 1200dpi using the scansnap default settings. You see a jump between 300 and 600, but little difference going on up to 1200 for this material. I posted the

I'd suggest that in 2019 when bits are cheap and high-quality scanners nearly as cheap, "crappy quality digital image" is a bit of a straw man. Yes, I've seen plenty of barely-readable or practically unreadable scans, but they were made years or decades ago. What dpi qualifies as not "crappy"? 300dpi? 400? 600?

It is not the DPI that is problem on some scans, but they used a LOSSY format to store the data. JPEG IS NO!

On Jul 21, 2019, at 6:16 AM, Joseph S. Barrera III via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I'd suggest that in 2019 when bits are cheap and high-quality scanners nearly as cheap, "crappy quality digital image" is a bit of a straw man. Yes, I've seen plenty of barely-readable or practically unreadable scans, but they were made years or decades ago. What dpi qualifies as not "crappy"? 300dpi? 400? 600?