> Why are these even worth anything or worth keeping, tidy your life, lighten up, etc. Either you really understand why 80 years of manuals, instructions and engineering notes related to 20th century electronics are of value both historically, aesthetically and culturally, or you don’t. To try to make the case would be a waste of time for both of us.
I'm not sure I do understand the motivation, but I don't think that I'm beyond understanding it. Is it that some of these systems are still in service? Is it just the history/archeology aspect?
You would be surprised how often old technical manuals are useful. Examples from my own work:
1) I was tasked with instrumenting the T58-GE-16 engines in a CH-46 [0]. So what did I need to inform my sensor placement and selection? Some schematics and technical manuals, all from the late 1960s, all undigitized.
2) I needed to reverse engineer an old test set. The documentation had been lost to time. When I cracked it open, I saw lots of 5400 & 7400 series chips. Now, this is kind of a trite example, because lots of working EEs still have copies of the TTL Data Book at hand. But still, I needed to refer to that old tome when working on this project.
3) When I worked at a NASA contractor, a primary piece of equipment failed. We needed a replacement in a hurry. Fortunately, someone had kept the older version of this system around. It dated from 1959 (!) but the manual was still around, too. A quick read through that manual got us back in business.
Technology never dies [1]. But without the manuals to understand that technology, things become much harder when you need to use that technology again.
I was working on instrumentation for testing an IR suppression system for the Phrog's exhaust. Here [0] is the exact aircraft (BuNo 152578) sitting at the Pax River NAS museum, with the IR suppression attached (and a nice big bundle of our thermocouple wiring, too). From what I could find in the records, this was either the 4th or 5th time the Navy had tried something like this, and the results were less than promising.
> Quality only happens when someone is responsible for it
When our test aircraft were being delivered, me and the other guys who work on the instro systems would ask, "Who was the asshole?" In other words, who took it upon themselves to be the person who made sure that things came together properly during buildup and checkout? The one aircraft we got where no one had stepped up for instrumentation and been the asshole has proven to be the most problematic of all the aircraft.
Maybe not the most elegant way to put it, but there you have it.
> I'm not sure I do understand the motivation, but I don't think that I'm beyond understanding it.
From an archaeological perspective, think about it 100 years from now (assuming there is no catastrophe -- a different topic).
Information lost now is lost forever. People in the future trying to reconstruct the past may well need various kinds of information that does not seem valuable today.
It's parallel to any library. Only a small fraction of any library will be of direct interest to any given person, but the collection overall is trying to serve a community, whether individuals see why various parts are useful or not.
> Why are these even worth anything or worth keeping, tidy your life, lighten up, etc.
This is an individual's thinking. The other point of view is about serving the larger community -- and not just now, but with very long term benefits.
"Historically, aesthetically and culturally". This isn't about saving manuals so people can keep running 80-year-old systems that are still in service. This is about history.
And learning from past works of science and engineering is how we keep learning and growing as a human race. So yeah, history - specifically science history, which is arguably even more important than your average history.
This isn't about saving manuals so people can keep running 80-year-old systems that are still in service.
I think it would be more correct to say that it isn't only about that. As somebody above pointed out, "technology never dies". You'd be shocked what you'll find still running out there if you look in the right places. Forget Silicon Valley for a minute... go find a manufacturing plant in the midwest or in the southeast somewhere, or even in the rust belt. A plant that makes some kind of goofy sub-assembly for producing something, where none of us have even though about that sub-assembly or would know what it was if we saw it. In that kind of place you'll still find all sorts of seemingly archaic technology... old IBM mainframes with drum hard-disk drives where the drum weighs about 50 lbs and stores 50MB of data. IBM S/36 and S/38 minicomputers, DEC PDP/11's, old VAX machines, you name it, it's out there. Heck, go check in some non-profit telephone cooperative somewhere in rural america... I'd be you'll find more of the same there. And so on, and so on...
I'm not sure I do understand the motivation, but I don't think that I'm beyond understanding it. Is it that some of these systems are still in service? Is it just the history/archeology aspect?