I’m sorting through the possessions of a relative who used to be a technician at Univac / Unisys and who recently passed away. I found a little technical manual from the “European Education and Training Center” for Sperry Univac. I’m wondering what to do with it. Maybe there’s some value in scanning it? As a physical object, the manual is in a very sorry state, but it is still perfectly readable.
The cover says:
1106/1108
Trouble Shooting Guide
(incorporating systems 1100/10 + 1100/20)
TZ16000
And of course it’s “company confidential information” but I guess nobody cares at this point.
Does anyone have suggestions? I guess I could simply send a PDF to archive.org? Maybe there’s a more appropriate place instead or in addition to that one?
Both! Step 1 is certainly to scan it - at whatever quality you can. Getting it scanned is more important than scanning it perfectly. Then you can upload a pdf to the Internet Archive, although it’s preferable (I believe) to upload a zip file of images, named *_images.zip because then the Archive runs a book-ingestion process, which includes OCR, production of a flip-book presentation and also a PDF. (example upload and result.)
Ha, the Univac 1108 was the second university mainframe I used, after the IBM 1130. I wrote my first PL/1 program on it. Also used a terminal for the first time, and discovered that the printer could actually print lower case alphabets.
But I didn’t know anything about the innards. Not that I would look into it now, but don’t mind me, I’m sure it will be useful to others; old documentation is precious.
I’ll second the suggestion to send it to bitsavers.org, but first check whether he has it or not. The fact I might have to even ask the question should be a clue to why I think that would be more appropriate than even the internet archive (which is also worthy.)
Also see what the internet archive says-bout bitsavers: Riding with the Bit Savers | Internet Archive Blogs
Thanks everyone for the suggestions! I’ve checked the index from the FTP of bitsavers but I couldn’t locate the manual I have. I’m roughly halfway through the process of scanning it, following the guidelines from archive.org. I’ll keep you all updated
Hallo. I do have some copies of 1106/1108 User’s manual, and more. They come from university time. Should I scan them? I will post the list to compare with others. Sperry Univac 1106/1108/1110 were well used in universities in Italy in the seventies. any suggestion?
This goes to show it’s really important to preserve these documents. I sent your link to someone I know is interested in making a 1108 emulator. His reply:
Just from a quick look, this appears to have a piece of information I really need, but had never found anywhere before - a description (at least at a high level) of the system boot process, particularly booting from tape.
OK, will try. What you folks suggest to use for scanning? tools? services? free stuff?tx for letting me know
when google did some massive book scanning, did it put tools as open source?
A smartphone is a possibility - not the best quality, but any scan is better than no scan. A printer/scanner can be good if the document will lie flat, or if you are ok to unbind it into sheets. aa sheetfed scanner is good but you probably don’t have one.
If using a smartphone, I found that Google Drive is rather neat. There’s an option to directly scan documents from it, with perspective correction, and upload them conveniently.
And FWIW, while scanning the manual with my flatbed scanner, I used NAPS2 which is simple and reliable. I also figured out that laying a heavy book on top of the thing I’m scanning is more convenient than the scanner lid for paper that has trouble laying flat on its own.
I think it’s evident that this is not the best method, and a proper scanner is better. Still, it’s better than nothing. Just make sure that the phone is mounted on something stable.
Thanks for sharing that Lars… in my own case, and it might depend on the smartphone camera and certainly on the lighting, I captured this massive paperback handheld:
Just one page was unreadable as I hadn’t quite waited for the autofocus to work. Someone supplied (to me) a substitute image for that page so I could replace it.
My main tip here is to make a stable v-shaped stand for the book so it can stay open, and also I used glass from a pictureframe to hold each side somewhat flat. You can in some of the pages see the faintest reflection of my phone, so that’s not museum-quality, but the job was done.
Anyone could revisit my images and adjust the contrast, the saturation, maybe the sharpness, maybe deskew them a bit. They could then upload their improved version.
I talked to the owner of bitsavers (who has access to a nice scanner). As you discovered, he doesn’t have much on Univac machines in general and would love to have these (or the scans if you’ve already finished scanning them)
You can contact him at aek@bitsavers.org to arrange something if you’re interested.
