[sebhc] Personal Katrina update

[Barry Watzman]

Steve, my most sincere condolences.

As many of you know, I have been heavily involved in scanning old computer
documentation into Acrobat PDF files, having personally scanned over 20,000
pages.  Others are archiving binary files.

We've had some "incidents" that point to the importance of this.  Steve's
experience is one of these, but also as some of you know, Don Maslin had
what was perhaps the largest archive in the entire world of old diskettes,
including thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of boot disks for old
systems.  He passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and his wife knew
nothing of his work or collection, which we now believe has been lost.

All of us, and all of our collections, are "going away", unfortunately, one
way or another, sooner or later.  Therefore, I believe that it is imperative
that if we want to "save" the history of classic computers for future
generations that it be archived and, very importantly, that the archive be
widely distributed.

Unfortunately, my archiving has been mostly of S-100 stuff, and of Z-100
stuff, but very little H-8 & H-89 -- most of what I have, in fact, is from
the sebhc archive.  However, I have what I think is the best Z-100 archive
available, including the entire TM-100 and Z-100 service manual as Acrobat
PDF files.

I want to encourage everyone to both archive and distribute both
documentation and binary code.  Most of the material that I have scanned is
on the Harte online library for free download, but if anyone wants a copy, I
sell a full DVD for $35, which I believe is by far the best single S-100
archive available (I believe that it's better than the entire library of
"Dynacomp" CDs being sold on E-Bay for $10 each).  The DVDs are hand-burned
one at a time since the collection grows continuously (and is on the verge
of exceeding a full DVD).  The price includes shipping.

If we don't archive this stuff AND DISTRIBUTE THE ARCHIVES, it's going to be
lost.  No single collection will survive indefinitely.

Regards, and, again, to Steve my most sincere condolences.
Barry Watzman
Watzman at neo.rr.com

PS - If you have some documents that you want to contribute, I may be
willing to scan them to PDF at no cost, and return both the originals and
the PDF file.  However, they must be unbound or I must have permission to
destroy the binding.


-----Original Message-----
From: sebhc-bounces at sebhc.org [mailto:sebhc-bounces at sebhc.org] On Behalf Of
Steven Parker
Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2005 8:13 AM
To: sebhc at sebhc.org
Subject: [sebhc] Personal Katrina update

Okay, so now I'm stirred...

Since my relocation (Feb), most of my stuff has been in climate-controlled 
storage.  Well, I found out just a couple of days ago that what I thought 
was a solid wall above my unit was glass painted with opaque paint.  Glass 
that Katrina sucked right off the building.  So my stuff experienced the 
hurricane, an additional week of weather, and has been sitting there soggy 
and exposed throughout.

I'm back in town now, scrambling to unpack boxes and try to dry out and 
rescue the contents (books in particular).  Another casualty was my H-47.  
My main H-8 was luckily one of the few things I had in my room.

If anyone knows effective methods for removing mold and mildew, particularly

from books, mail them to me directly (since its off-topic).  Likewise if you

know how to release pages that are glued together (I'm guessing from 
cardboard adhesives that wicked up into them) without harming the print.

-- Steven

P.S. No insurance.  I thought the entire building was brick; and if it had 
been, everthing would have survived intact.


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