Almost 3.5 million manuals scanned in.
Archive.org is the greatest treasure of our current times
I have been doing lots of deep dives and finding so much great stuff.
I used it just last week to find the manual for my 20 year old VCR.
archive.org is great, but is it just me or is the site just super slow all the time?
Having a huge archive means some of the data isn’t replicated many times, so you relying on a few machines to serve many people.
On top of that, the archive is a common target for denial of service attacks, if they have archive some information people would rather not exist
Indeed. Unfortunate characteristic of the Internet Archive in the age where almost everything is instantaneous. It’s a treasure we must protect to preserve the accessibility of our history.
I can get lost in there for so long. A recent rabbit hole I’ve gotten lost in is looking at old commercials that were recorded on Beta and VHS and uploaded. I also love old restored footage (~100+ years ago) that gets uploaded. It’s amazing to just watch this history, try to put yourself into the context of the time period, and vicariously experience these human beings that are either so old or long dead.
Preserve what you can, folks. Protect our history.
Also, fuck DRM and Everything-as-a-Service.
I’m a big fan of archive.org and I regularly look for manuals, but they don’t show up in common searches as a source, so knowing that now is really helpful. Thanks!
Their search isn’t great, I get better results using site:archive.org on Google
I often do that too. Sometimes browsing by category is useful though.
sounds like we could get venture capital funding for making a front end for this and mentioning AI.
Them implementing something open source like llama may be the one and only good use of machine learning.
Yes I used it for the manual for my VCR. I then used it to upload a copy I took of a BBC 20th anniversary night of Star Trek 🤣
I’ve been meaning to download the manuals of everything I own from here for my NAS. This website is a treasure.
