It's hard to unroll the importance of this effort, and the work Jason Scott and archive.org does...but think of this.
Today, we look back at the development of mass manufacturing from a historical perspective, there are entire museums dedicated to nothing but preserving and educating people about this technological transformation...and we still learn modern lessons from it every day.
For example, you can go to Harpers Ferry, WV and see a small museum with a working workshop that's capable of converting nothing more than raw materials and river power to guns.
To wit, an impressive amount of my career has been about nothing more than applying mass manufacturing techniques to previously bespoke work, and I'm proud to say that it has transformed the way some organizations approach certain classes of problems. And it's often nothing more than me coming into a workplace and saying "let's see if we can get this problem up-to-speed with the industrial revolution"
These manuals are not so much about how an individual can operate outdated equipment as that they capture how humans dealt with complex technical challenges over decades. In a hundred years, historians looking at the digital scans of this archive might find a "first of" known process or technology that turns into a later technological revolution that we might not even be aware that we're part of right now that could transform all of humanity.
I completely agree. Perhaps it's my "more data is good data" approach, but the more we save of our history (no matter how seemingly inconsequential), the better.
> To wit, an impressive amount of my career has been about nothing more than applying mass manufacturing techniques to previously bespoke work, and I'm proud to say that it has transformed the way some organizations approach certain classes of problems. And it's often nothing more than me coming into a workplace and saying "let's see if we can get this problem up-to-speed with the industrial revolution"
That sounds fascinating. Can you give some examples?
It's actually not that interesting believe it or not. A surprising number of pretty banal business processes never caught on to the idea of a repeatable process -- or it's assumed that "repeatable" means "having a human do it".
For example, I have a program manager coworker who spent about half of her week building reports to go out to her client. Almost 90% of that time was spent copy-pasting data into excel and turning those tables into charts.
I pointed out that these charts could probably just be automatically generated. Half a day of work by one of our colleagues and it was. Another couple days work and all she needed to do was run a script in the folder with the raw data and it'd even spit out a draft .docx with most of the key sections done (I think he used python-docx for this).
It's just very simple stuff like that, when you work up and down any organization's business processes, you can find all kinds of stuff like this -- often long running. It doesn't even always have to be automated, sometimes just rethinking physical processes in simple ways can have a profound impact.
The hard part is convincing people that this means their employees can either finish the same amount of work early, or can do more with the time they have.
Man, the stories I've heard since starting to work at a web hosting company. A ton of these places started in the 90s, and basically just installed Apache and Exim and built a webpage, then set everything to email someone who would set it all up manually.
Today, we look back at the development of mass manufacturing from a historical perspective, there are entire museums dedicated to nothing but preserving and educating people about this technological transformation...and we still learn modern lessons from it every day.
For example, you can go to Harpers Ferry, WV and see a small museum with a working workshop that's capable of converting nothing more than raw materials and river power to guns.
To wit, an impressive amount of my career has been about nothing more than applying mass manufacturing techniques to previously bespoke work, and I'm proud to say that it has transformed the way some organizations approach certain classes of problems. And it's often nothing more than me coming into a workplace and saying "let's see if we can get this problem up-to-speed with the industrial revolution"
These manuals are not so much about how an individual can operate outdated equipment as that they capture how humans dealt with complex technical challenges over decades. In a hundred years, historians looking at the digital scans of this archive might find a "first of" known process or technology that turns into a later technological revolution that we might not even be aware that we're part of right now that could transform all of humanity.
Astonishing work and well done.