On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 23:34:35 -0700, "Watson A.Name - \"Watt Sun, the
Dark Remover\"" wrote:

One thought. Many of the test equipment (and manuals) were duplicated
for the miltary. One off the top of my head is the AN/USM-81 which was
the same as the Tek 541 'scope, IIRC. This may not be copyrighted, or
may have some other way of getting around the copyright laws. And many
schools, such as the military schools, published schematics to use for
training.

Jeepers, I wish those military manuals were better. I downloaded a few
of them from https://www.logsa.army.mil/etms/online.htm and although
they were usefull, they certainly were not up to par when compared to
the real thing. Often unreadable schematics and missing vital info.

If anyone has found a better place to download this stuff then I'd
love to see a follow up post about it.

On a side note, it's my experience that there are not many folks out
there who really know how to maintain electronic records without
corruption and loss for more than a few years. I've seen data get
corrupt because folks do silly things like copy large repositories of
data from one place to another and then neglect to do a binary
compare, run disk defrag software against large drives containing
valuable data on machines with crappy systemic bit-error-rates,
transfer gigabytes of data on computers without ECC memory or
without UPS protection, no backup strategies or crappy media or
unmaintained tape drives. Failure to check C1/C2 error rates on
freshly burned CDROMS, and on and on. Many perils.

It is awakening to see how a paper record can last thousands of years
while digital data evaporates out of EEPROMS and magnetic media in a
few ephemeral years even before the copyright has a chance to expire.
When the duration of copyright protection, far exceeds the data
retention of digital media, then there is an increased risk of loosing
it. This is not the fault of copyright but a weakness of the media and
a lack of use of digital signatures to prove authenticity or heritage.

It's interesting to note how long ago the DNA of dinasours appeared on
earth, in comparison to the half-life of digitally preserved data.
Note also that data evolves over time in a way reminiscent of the
evolution of DNA in living species. After all,only the most valuable
data survives and it is constantly improved upon and stepwise changed.
Data however, seems to evolve much more quickly than living species,
and the host machines it lives in seem to evolve with it at an equally
fast rate.

Stepan