Manx is dead
Manx, my catalogue of online manuals for old computers, is now dead. There are several reasons for this.
The most important reason is that I haven’t had time to maintain it for the last couple of years, and priorities in my life have changed so far that I don’t imagine I’ll ever get back to it. If I left the database online, it would only disappoint people as the catalogue covered a decreasing percentage of the available scanned documentation.
Unfortunately, when it was maintained, it was by a set of arcane scripts and command line wizardry that went straight to the database. There never was any decent graphical interface, and therefore there isn’t anything to pass to another maintainer. They’d either have to follow the same painful route as me, or spend a lot of time coding an interface.
I should have coded a graphical interface to allow people to contribute to the database a long time ago, but I don’t have much evidence of interest in its development. Many years ago, I received a few requests for copies of the database, and I sent them out. I also put database dumps online, so if anyone fancied building tools and feeding back the results, they could do so. However, I never heard from anyone who found them useful, or had any ideas for improvements.
Another reason for its demise is that Google is now OCRing scanned material, which will eventually make all of these archives searchable. Of course that isn’t the same as a catalogue, but the main purpose of putting documents online is to make them findable by, and useful to, more people. Cataloguing appeals to my desire to put things in order, but it isn’t a big thrill, as hobbies go. I’d rather work on attaining Shodan.
Please post up a dump (zip archive, etc) of the whole thing; manx is (was) an invaluable archive.
PLEASE make the content of Manx available (anything machine readable) so that your work will not be lost!!! Otherwise lots of Hobbyists would loose a precious source of information.
Thank you!
I second Stephen’s request. This info could then be posted at http://DECUSlib.com for all to continue access.
Fourthed! Please make this content available to the unwashed masses for archiving and local use. This is too valuable a resource to lose.
We would also be delighted to take it over and keep it in the world. This was an incredibly useful catalog.
Manx has been exceptionally useful to me over the last few years. Even if links are broken (a problem I have NOT experienced), being able to identify the manual needed, and in many cases to read its table of contents, is still of great value.
On a number of occasions, I’ve needed Manx to find the needed manual on Bitsavers. As an index to the latter alone (and note that Bitsavers doesn’t move, or pull content with any regularity), Manx is worth preserving. I’ve never been under the illusion that it is complete or without bit rot or even errors. Surely no one reasonably expects it to be perfect.
In the past few days, wondering what happened to Manx, I discovered for the first time your past offers of database dumps, and the capability to obtain an id to do some database maintenance. This has pointed out to me that like many others, I’ve taken Manx for granted, and failed to contribute to it. Based on the comments I’ve read in various online places, others are also realizing the extent to which the valued it. Perhaps we’ll all be motivated to do better.
I hope you’ll reconsider.
Manx was a handy resource and I’m sure will be missed by many. Thanks for the effort you put into it.
I’ve contributed entries to Manx in the past and like others I’ve always found it very useful. It helped me locate documentation that wasn’t on bitsavers, but was in other document collections. Like others, I would gladly help takeover stewardship of the database and help code some sort of community UI where updates could be made in a decentralized fashion. At the very least a dump of the database would be a great start.
Manx was *very* useful to me. Surely, some links to documents pointed to nowhere, but it was a database that surely saved me from getting grey hairs here and there.
I’m thinking about reviving something like Manx. For private purposes, I worked on some OCRing of scanned pages myself, adding the text as an overlay to the PDF files. After all, that’s some kind of Document Management what needs to be done.
I tried to download your database dump (you linked it as http://vt100.net/manx/dump/dec-all-20090403.tsv in an older blog entry), but that link doesn’t work any longer. I’m really interested in working on that topic, it would be nice if you’d make the dump available (again).
However, *thank you*, quite a lot. You did a lot of good work with that database, which actually solved a real problem.
Consider this another request to make the content available, in ANY form; a giant .tar or .zip file would be fine. I understand that your priorities have changed, and everyone respects that, but many of us have come to depend upon this resource for our activities and it would be a great loss if it were to just disappear. Please consider just giving us the raw data and we’ll take care of the rest.
And, of course, thank you very much for having provided this resource in the first place! It has been a boon to myself and many, many others.
I’m very-very sorry. It’s site was very useful for me…
Thanks for all the effort you put into Manx and thanks for hosting those few docs that I did get around to scanning.
Antonio
I should have done things in a different order. Sorry. I have a lot of thoughts about the organisation of the data in Manx that will be necessary to understand it and hopefully guide any future community. I’ll write more later, and try to get some time at the weekend to dump things.
Thanks a lot for now, and thanks for working on the dumps again!
manx is reborn. Well, almost anyway. We’ve started an open source project hosted on codeplex to recreate the original manx functionality using the database dumps so graciously provided here. We’d love contributors from the manx user community. First we will reproduce the existing functionality so that Paul can take the old manx offline anytime he feels like it. Then we’d like to continue the development to allow the community to contribute directly to the data hosted in manx. Assuming Paul doesn’t object, we’d like to continue the brand.
@Richard
I have no objection at all to you using the name Manx. (I’m not sure where the capital “M” disappeared to, but if that’s your preference, I don’t mind!)