12mo ago

YSK the Internet Archive has a giant depository of scanned-in manuals for virtually anything you can think of that needs one, going back decades.

archive.org

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Almost 3.5 million manuals scanned in.

13 comments

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'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
  
  sounds like we could get venture capital funding for making a front end for this and mentioning AI.
  
  I often do that too. Sometimes browsing by category is useful though.
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've been meaning to download the manuals of everything I own from here for my NAS. This website is a treasure.
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 🤣

13 comments