New NeXT-related documentation at the INDeX

[Rhetorica]

Thanks to some heroic efforts by @ZombiePhysicist we now have scans of the following NeXT books available for perusal:

_{(Click the book covers to download. The RenderMan book is still high-DPI bitmap scans, 116 MB, but the others are now properly binarized and much smaller.)}

These books are virtually extinct—archive.org doesn't have them and they cannot be purchased anywhere as far as we can tell, but there is no finer resource for learning the ins and outs of DPS from a NeXT perspective. The RenderMan book is from 2007 and is probably the least specific of the three, but it may still be relevant to anyone who wants to play around with the NeXT RenderManager.app demo.

[wmlive]

Excellent contributions! Thanks a lot for these treasure troves!

Search on archive.org can be a bit tricky and certainly could be a bit more intelligent. At least the Objective-C book can be found at archive.org/details/objectivecobject00pins when searching for the term creator:"Pinson, Lewis" (instead of creator:"Lewis Pinson").

[ptek]

Thank you for this

EDIT: How long did this take to scan?

[ZombiePhysicist]

Not too long on the scan part as I have a couple of super fast scanners. Like 200+ppm. I dont remember if I did these when I had the Panasonic KV S5076H or my more current Canon DR-G2140.

I got a book slicer, to cleanly slice the back. Sadly that's the best way to do it other than getting VERY expensive, and slow, specialized page turning book scanners. So sadly the price of this is the original book dies. But I find the ability to search etc worth the trade off.

Did it as part of my "im tired of moving this stuff and never using this stuff" project to scan all my old text books, and other books and notebooks so I dont have to move all that physical stuff anymore. I'm sure some of those into the original physical material will be aghast and I kind of share that sentiment, but I just dont have the space for all that stuff anymore.

And hopefully it finds more use for others here too.

[wmlive]

Pro Tip: Always include also any empty pages when scanning a book, even if these don't have any content.
Excluding empty pages breaks the pagination and needlessly complicates the creation of a page index ("bookmarks").
Leaving out empty pages also results in breakage of the right/left side page layout design.

[ZombiePhysicist]

Sadly I probably didnt do that and likely left a lot of default settings on the scan. Apologies for any frustration.

[Adam_Hall]

I got a book slicer, to cleanly slice the back. Sadly that's the best way to do it other than getting VERY expensive, and slow, specialized page turning book scanners. So sadly the price of this is the original book dies. But I find the ability to search etc worth the trade off.

Did the same with music books I had, only way to get a really good scan was to destroy the book.

[ptek]

Not too long on the scan part as I have a couple of super fast scanners. Like 200+ppm. I dont remember if I did these when I had the Panasonic KV S5076H or my more current Canon DR-G2140.

I got a book slicer, to cleanly slice the back. Sadly that's the best way to do it other than getting VERY expensive, and slow, specialized page turning book scanners. So sadly the price of this is the original book dies. But I find the ability to search etc worth the trade off.

Did it as part of my "im tired of moving this stuff and never using this stuff" project to scan all my old text books, and other books and notebooks so I dont have to move all that physical stuff anymore. I'm sure some of those into the original physical material will be aghast and I kind of share that sentiment, but I just dont have the space for all that stuff anymore.

And hopefully it finds more use for others here too.

200+ppm sounds crazy fast. I thought it would be something like 20ppm and even then that would be fast.


Thanks for sacrificing your books. Now to use them.


No example disk with the display postscript book?

[ZombiePhysicist]

I dont think there was ever an example disk with it. I got the book 2nd hand so cannot know for sure.

[Rhetorica]

Thanks to a helper who has asked to remain anonymous, the DPS and Objective-C book links have been replaced with version that are much smaller in file size; hopefully they don't compromise on quality.

@ZombiePhysicist has also provided us with a copy of The CSC Hard Drive Bible (8th Edition, 1996) which covers everything a technician needs to know about diagnosing hardware problems with drives of the era. It contains an incredible wealth of information that is now basically useless, but if you have a drive serial number for an antiquated device and want to write a disktab, it may actually be useful. Unfortunately there is nothing about the signals or protocols drives use to communicate, only the pinouts and jumper settings for various drive types. You would not be able to use this book to write a driver. Sorry, @ptek.

[jeffburg]

so cool! thanks for scanning these!

[ptek]

I dont think there was ever an example disk with it. I got the book 2nd hand so cannot know for sure.

All good, I'll slowly work through the book 

Thanks to a helper who has asked to remain anonymous, the DPS and Objective-C book links have been replaced with version that are much smaller in file size; hopefully they don't compromise on quality.

@ZombiePhysicist has also provided us with a copy of The CSC Hard Drive Bible (8th Edition, 1996) which covers everything a technician needs to know about diagnosing hardware problems with drives of the era. It contains an incredible wealth of information that is now basically useless, but if you have a drive serial number for an antiquated device and want to write a disktab, it may actually be useful. Unfortunately there is nothing about the signals or protocols drives use to communicate, only the pinouts and jumper settings for various drive types. You would not be able to use this book to write a driver. Sorry, @ptek.

Yes you are correct, all that old information would have been useful in one book pre internet days especially as it was the eighth edition. All those old jumper settings and worrying about the C/H/S (Cylinders, Head Sectors) which was made obsolete with the ATA standard which just read the sectors from the HDD when the size was greater than 8GB and because it had a fixed to C/H/S to indicate to read directly from the IDE HDD.

  Thanks for the upload, had to have a look at it just in case.
Hmm you open the pdf in the browser and when you click to download it, it downloads it again, I don't know why it can't save the opened file in the browser to the HDD unless it's because I'm always in private browsing mode.

[wmlive]

@ZombiePhysicist has also provided us with a copy of The CSC Hard Drive Bible (8th Edition, 1996) which covers everything a technician needs to know about diagnosing hardware problems with drives of the era. [...]

Found two copies of these also here:
archive.org/details/bitsavers_cscCSCHardn1996_26671118
archive.org/details/CSC_Hard_Drive_Bible_Edition_8_1996 (with much better graphics but missing a few pages)

[Adam_Hall]

I made a version of these 3 PDF files that is a little bigger, but may be easier to read on a tablet or slower computer. They should allow you to flip through pages quicker and there should be no serious loss in quality.

There is an attachment size limit here so I stuck it over on Super Dimensional Fortress if anyone is interested.

They are here:
http://adamchall.sdf.org/stuff/my_pdfs.zip