(library stickers censored out to avoid doxxing myself)
edit: woag this blowed up. uh. if you're reading this, become a communist
I know because I borrowed it and learned me some Macintosh toolbox development, this is not a complaint
When I was in college I tried to find online information about using VMS and the VAX computer, and there was virtually none (this was the early 2000s before millions of books were scanned). But it turned out that my school library still had books on the matter kicking around from decades before. I used them to type up a super eleet textfile on the basics of VAX assembly programming which I still have available but please do not judge me too hard for how I talked when I was A First Generation Online Child
(My school still had A Real VAX you see) (and is probably still running the entire student registration system in an emulated VAX to this day)
I wish more libraries did this. My local libraries as a kid tended to cycle through computer stuff semi-regularly, so the older stuff would eventually get punted to the bookstore free bin.
On the upside of this though, I got some seriously cool stuff out of that bin over the years, including a first edition K&R C book and the first 3 volumes of the Art of Creative Computing books.
There's one though that I think about sometimes that I wish I could remember the name of, but it was this one guy who attempted to write like the complete manual of computers ... all computers. Like an encyclopedia mashed with a tutorial book, it was full of short highlights of everything from hardware to software to programming, literally touching on snippets of like a dozen programming languages, different common software, operating systems, some early internet stuff. It was amazing at the time and probably unthinkable now, and damn if I can remember any names. Just that it was a solo guy who mostly self-published and sold the book on his own website, and had kinda made it his mission to teach regular folks computer stuff.
I'll probably never find it again. He did keep up regular editions for some years, but as the internet exploded and kinda obsoleted stuff like that faster than you could print it, I'm sure most copies just ended up recycled without a second thought.
