There's two ways to help with this project, besides downloading everything you like and keeping a copy for posterity and history, and using the materials to learn and get information.

Consider Becoming a Mirror

If you have an excess of bandwidth and space, consider hosting a mirror or being an image repository for this site. The numbers are not going to be pretty: the first 50 or so pages of scanned material came out to 700 megabytes. It's also possible to just host the smaller material (the JPEGs, basically) and that goes way down, into the less than 50 megabyte range. It's a lot of hits for the ability to show people that computers were goofier and more expensive a few years back, but that's what history is about, isn't it?

Send Me Your Own Scanned Material

If the thought of ingesting gigabytes of material and then transferring gigabytes out again makes your hair curl, then consider the other way of helping: by sending in more scanned material. If you have older advertisements, brochures, flyers, or similar historical stuff related to computers, I'm always looking for scans of this stuff. If you just have a couple things, then it might make more sense for you to scan it in and arrange with me for an FTP. If it's more than a half-dozen, then we should see about transferring CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs. There's a number of avenues open, depending.

The best compromise between size and detail seems to be 300dpi scans into TIFF format. This produces around 15mb a page, but it's got a ton of detail. I don't need it "prettied up", but making a best shot at a color scan that shows photo and line elements as best as you can is appreciated.

Contacting Me If you have an interest in helping in either of these ways, mail me at jason@textfiles.com and we can discuss details. Let's get to work!

Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM