wrote in message
...
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.

Well, the 'unreadable' and 'missing' sound to me like that's a copying
or scanning problem, not the fault of the manual itself.

Generally, when I was in the army, the manuals were broken down into 5
levels.

1 - operation (like how to drive a car)
2 - maintenance (like how to change the oil, add water to radiator,
etc.)
3 - service (like tires, batteries, etc.)
4 - field repair (like fixing the starter or the brakes)
5 - depot repair (like rebuilding the engine)

Those 5 "echelons" are only a rough idea of how the manuals were
arranged. Some military manuals were combined, such as a "-35" manual
included the 3rd thru 5th echelon - basically everything about service
and repair. A "-15" manual would be all of the above.

You may have to get 2 or more military manuals to get all the info that
might be in a regular equipment manual from the manufacturer.

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

Well, if you are in the military, I would imagine that all of that is
now online and available to the authorized people.

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.

Welcome to the Real World. Bugs eat papers, manuals and books. Acid in
the paper makes it turn brittle and brown after a few decades, making it
nearly useless. But these problems are not related to the topic were
discussing. However the bookworms should be very concerned about the
copyright restrictions because they are severely restricting their food
source! ;-)

[snip]

Stepan