Old computer books? Oh, we shred them!

From: Phil Guerney <guerney_at_uq.net.au>
Date: Sat Apr 24 09:13:34 1999

Every two years at this time the University of Queensland Alumni Association
holds a large sale of old books donated by individuals plus library
discards. I've found some good collectables there in the past, such as old
manuals, but this time (today) it took me five minutes to just find where
the computer books were - instead of a full trestle table top as in previous
years, there was just 4 inches of space reserved for them - maybe 20 books
in a hall of many many thousands.

I found the lady in charge and asked what had happened to them? She said "we
kept any computer books dated in the 50's or 60's (I didn't find any), and
anything fairly recent, but all donations from the 70's and 80's went out."

I asked "Did you send them to one of the charities to sell at their
bookfests?". Her response "oh no, they just go straight to the shredder! -
we can't get rid of them otherwise."

And sadly, I suspect she was correct. Besides the odd character like me
looking for manuals for long gone models, most of the stuff that went out
for sale was rubbish to 99.99+% of people and stayed on the table at the end
of the day. But I sure wish she had at least given me the chance to look
through that stuff before it hit the shredder.

The good news was that I found amongst the "sets" (encyclopedias etc) a full
set (I think, 22 volumes anyway) of the Time-Life series Understanding
Computers. Lots of good computer history and pictures - but I would be
interested if anyone has any criticism of the facts presented in any of the
articles in that series - they seem authoritative enough, but then some of
the people on this list know more than the usual sources that Time-Life
writers would have used.

Phil
in Brisbane, Australia.
Received on Sat Apr 24 1999 - 09:13:34 BST

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