spring cleaning

[mellowtigger]

It's hard to believe that I have books almost 100 years old in my library.

Stuff that I'm throwing away...

"The Universal Reference Library", 1949, which includes sections on "Christian Names of Men" and women
Bear cub scout book, 1975
"Tunnels of Doom" manual, for game cartridge for TI 99/4A, 1982
"MS-Basic Quick Reference Guide" 1983
Turbo Pascal 3.0 manual, for TI PC, 1985
DPath+ manual, for TI PC, 1985
"Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain", 3rd ed., 1988
"Get the most out of your Amiga" 1993
Borland C++ Builder 5 manual, 2000
various printed dictionaries (french, russian, synonym/antonym, quotations, foreign terms, etc)

Some oddities that I'm keeping...

Latin-English Dictionary by John T. White, no copyright printed anywhere I can find, 27th edition, preface dated January 1866
keeping it because it's a discard from my old high school, and it's really old

"Robinson Crusoe" hardback, published by Grosset & Dunlap of New York, no print date
keeping it because it has my mother's (maiden) name written in it, probably her childhood book
even this webpage has no date for it, #6, pale green cover

"Elementary Principles of Agriculture", 1914
keeping it because it has the name "Elmerce Wade" printed in it, which I think is my mother's father
(he died by the time I was born, so I wouldn't know)

some old AD&D v1 books
keeping it because it has the name of my ex printed in it

Comments

[kauko.livejournal.com]

I've got quite a few old books in my library including a copy of the complete works of Josephus from the late 1760's, a British Military issued Jewish prayer book from WW2, a copy of volume one of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique in French from 1789, a Jewish machzor (high holy day's prayer book) from Russia dated 1890's, a Vulgate Bible from the 1800's, and maybe 5+ other books I can't remember off hand. There's something amazing, personally, about holding something, especially something as fragile as a book, that old and thinking of all the generations of people who may have held it and read it before.

[kauko.livejournal.com]

Actually, just looked up Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique on Wikipedia and it was published in 1764 which means my copy is only 20 years later, which I think is pretty cool :)

[mellowtigger]

It's easy to think that books were "always" around. The older a book is, though, the more I think about the cost of producing it. Fewer were made, so choices of topics were more limited. It's fascinating to see what printers spent their effort to produce, and what purchasers spent their money to acquire (and why they did so). The printing press is only about 500 years old. Before that, copies were made by hand. It's easy to forget the timeline, in an age where people are even growing beyond an interest in daily newspapers.

[mellowtigger]

p.s. Oh, yeah, and all of recorded history is only about 10 times older than the printing press.

Old books are full of meaning, beyond their printed pages. :)

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I just found my copy of the BASIC II for PDP-11 manual.

[mellowtigger]

*laugh*

Did you play many computer games back then? Like NetTrek, I think it was called, the Star Trek game for VM mainframes? Or any of the Vaxen games like GT (Galaxy Trader, I think)?

My first experience with programming was LOGO on the TI 99/4A console, though I poked around with some assembly on it too. My first "real" language was Turbo Pascal for the TI PC.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

The only one I played was Adventure, and that was on a PDP-8. By the time we were using the PDP-11 we did all of our work in Pascal. I think I had this to support the students using BASIC cause I never used it. Oh wait except we had this cool little graphics PC that DEC produced called the GiGi, that had BASIC as a native language. How I wish DEC had been a serious market contender, that was such a cool machine, real graphics that the PC didn't have and real languages that the Mac didn't have. http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Digital/gigi/index.php

I used Turbo Pascal for years and years, the last one I had was object-oriented Pascal when that technology was new.