[TriLUG] Any value in decades old mainframe manuals and printouts?

[Gregory Belles]

I recently moved to an IBM mainframe group (building Linux lpars) and would be interested in looking specifically at the IBM printed manuals that Don has.   They won't pay for us to purchase manuals any more.   I can meet you at your convenience. 
 
Greg Belles (gbelles at yahoo.com)

--- On Mon, 7/27/09, trilug-request at trilug.org <trilug-request at trilug.org> wrote:

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:23:25 -0400
From: Don Hammond <trilug at tradersdata.com>
Subject: [TriLUG] Any value in decades old mainframe manuals and
    printouts?
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
Message-ID: <9A43A015-5CBB-49F6-85BE-7C74F33D10D3 at tradersdata.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

I'm cleaning up and going through boxes and boxes of manuals and  
printouts that my late brother saved, and trying to figure out if  
there's any value to them. By value, I mean research, historical  
collection, curiosity, reminiscing, etc., not monetary.

They seem to be early to mid 70's through early to mid 80's. I believe  
they're all from work he did with IBM mainframes.  A lot of them look  
like work product in various stages of development, so I'd guess are  
of no value.  But there are also printouts of documentation.  It  
appears to me that he did work (or experimented) on mainframes with  
Fortran, Snobol, Pascal, Cobol, and probably others, and he printed  
out a lot of documentation from Introductions/Overviews to syntax.  
There are also code listings, but I can't tell if they're his or  
samples that go with the documentation.  I also have a handful of mag  
tapes, although I seriously doubt they're readable, even if I had a way.

There are also a dozen or more boxes of "official" printed manuals,  
again all apparently IBM mainframe stuff of the same vintage. I've  
contacted someone I know at IBM to see if they have any ideas for  
finding someone there who can express interest, or not, in the manuals.

This probably seems a bit odd. Without getting bogged down in the  
emotions of jettisoning a loved ones possessions, I'd feel great if it  
turned out some piece of this had some value to someone. And I'd feel  
better to put out this feeler and get (considered, please) "no it's  
crap" responses, than to throw it all away and wonder.

Thanks for any ideas.

Don Hammond

P.S. If this stirs anyone's interest, there is a lot of stuff beyond  
that described above. He was a researcher at heart, and I have all  
kinds of material on probably at least a dozen languages that he  
played with on his own, theoretical papers (from operating system  
design to programming languages and concepts) back to the 60's, and  
who knows what else.  In his later years, smalltalk was his thing, but  
he had his fingers on an amazing array of things. If you have a  
historical itch for something specific, I'd be pleased to look for  
anything that might scratch it. Off-list is fine with me.

P.P.S. There is nothing Commodore related as far as I've found.