Old Computing Books

[segaloco]

Hey, I'm curious what books people might have bumping around their libraries? It was making a collection post with a bunch of pictures of mine that set off the spam-reaper so not going to drop a bunch of pictures yet. Still, my current bookshelf contains a bunch of old UNIX and Western Electric/AT&T stuff, architecture manuals for several ISAs, internals books on a number of operating systems, and a number of programming language standards and original reference manuals.

I'm a sucker for books since I can pop them open on my desk and save screen space. It's also nice putting a visual on how some of the older materials were actually published and distributed. My hope is for my collection to eventually wind up with some computer history library or university program. Some examples:

1961 Extended COBOL Specification
1977 ANSI Fortran Standard
1974 ANSI COBOL Standard
1989 Annotated ANSI C Standard
1983 ANSI Pascal Standard
UNIX Sixth Edition Manuals and Bell Labs branded Lions' Commentary
UNIX Seventh Edition Manuals
UNIX Tenth Edition Manuals
UNIX System III Manual and Half of Volume 2
UNIX Release 4.0 Starter Packages
UNIX Release 4.1 User's Manual
UNIX System V 12 Volume set by Western Electric
UNIX Release 5.0 Bell Labs Internal Manuals
4.2, 4.3, and 4.4BSD Usenix Manuals
POSIX 1986 draft and 1988 final standards
Internals on Multics, VAX/VMS, Windows, and several flavors of UNIX (4.4BSD, SVR2, Solaris, HP-UX)
Architecture manuals for RCA 501, PDP-11, VAX, 6502, Z80, MC68000, MIPS, SuperH, 8086/8088, AVR, TMS9900, 80386, PowerPC, ARM32, RISC-V

There's more stuff there but that is a good start. I envision this more as a general "share what books ya got" thread than just focused on mine, I'm curious what old tech literature other folks have!

 

[Abmvk]

I don't know if it is really old, but I love my copy of Rodney Zack's book on the Z80. Besides that, most is ZX 81 and ZX Spectrum books, and some AS/400

 

[appleIImidi]

I've got a lot of Apple II related books, for a while I was buying up TAB books, Sams, etc. Oldest manual I have is probably for my Model 15 Teletype.

 

[commodorejohn]

I think I have all the Amiga developer docs from the KS/WB 1.3 era, a number of misc. C64 books, particularly Compute! titles (including Programming the Commodore 64, my go-to reference for everything shy of deep VIC trickery and 6502 ML - for which I swiped the relevant pages out of the VIC-20 manual,) the CP/M 2.2 manuals (Kaypro-brand, IIRC,) and a number of assorted books on graphics from the VGA/SVGA era...oh, and a hardcover copy of the TMS-9900 hardware manual.

 

[cjs]

• My NEC TK-85 manual, of course, which took me longer than I would have liked (and cost more than I would have liked) to get. I'm still working on a TK-80 set.
• I have full (I think, and excluding peripherals) manual sets for the Fujitsu FM-8 and Fujitsu FM-7 (the former of which obviously I need to get around to scanning).
• Several ASCII's PC-Techknow books, which I have yet to get around to giving a serious read.
• Various I/O別冊 books, which are basically just collections of articles from the magazine, but are great to have all in one place, especially the schematics. I have PC-8001活用研究, PC活用研究 (PC-8001, PC-8001mkII, PC-8801), and MZ-80B活用研究. I despair of ever getting the Hitachi Basic Master one; I really should have just shelled out for it last time it came around, even though it did go for an entirely stupid price.
• Lots more, I guess, but too many really to go through. You can see a few more on my archive.org page. (Only about a third of the stuff up there is mine, however; much of it is just things I found in other obscure locations and wanted to make more accessible.)

I also need to get around to asking Al what the best way to deal with scanning is when all one has is one of those "camera on a stand" scanners, so I can start generating stuff suitable for Bitsavers (if it accepts Japanese items).

 

[cj7hawk]

I too have an old Rodney Zaks book for the z80. Also a full set of Sinclair manuals for all of their computers.
Beyond that, Osborne, O2 Exec, Amstrad 6128 manuals...
A few CP/M books and some original DRI texts.
The Peter Norton Blue Book
EISA and ISA Theory and Operation book.
The early Atmel microcontroller book ( slowly losing pages ).
I also have a manual for the PC8801 in Japanese, which I can't read but sometimes use google translate.
And a copy of "Fire in the Valley" which is a fun historical read.
not a large bookshelf anymore.

I have a few digital books too.

And of course, a first copy edition of "Turing Evolved" with the different ending.

 

[segaloco]

Since I'm in the process of moving and have yet to procure some new bookshelves, unfortunately I've got stacks of books hanging out on my office floor. Figured maybe a good opportunity to snap a few pictures. I like seeing old books because PDFs just don't do the physicality of them justice. Here are a few things I've got sitting around right now.

First is the leaning tower of AT&T:



I've been keen on picking up BSP manuals from the 80s when I can spot them. Several of these have come in handy on various telephone projects, and on more than one occasion I've had the pleasure of looking something up for someone. Long term these are to be gifted to the Connections Museum. There's stuff in there on maintaining telephones themselves as well as modem and "outside plant" activities like running cable and interface units.

Some early IBM computing docs:



I have some more 7090/7094 stuff on the way, but to keep things tidy I'm not generally looking for IBM stuff after that era. That'll just about round out what I want to have from IBM's earliest days in computing. I might consider adding a 360-era manual on JCL but not as interested in post-700/7000 IBM. A real gem would be one of the original 704 Fortran manuals but I'm not holding my breath.

Some language manuals and standards:



I've got many more language books but these are the ones I've scooted over thus far. I'm quite elated to have come across the ANSI standards in particular, the only others I find myself quite often keeping an eye out for are Minimal BASIC and then a non-annotated C standard. POSIX.2 would also be nice.

Finally, a smattering of CPU literature:



This is only a chunk as well but aside from the 8008 (to my knowledge) all CPUs I happen to have at least one instance of in some form or another.

That's all for now but may share more as my moving progresses. Hopefully by the time of the next set I'll have bought or built a new shelf...