Mission

From Tandy Tech
Revision as of 12:11, 7 March 2017 by Bkw (talk | contribs)
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There is a LOT of info out there already, in the form of several web sites and forums and mail lists, but they are all either static archives of old info, or ephemeral conversations. No ongoing living documentation. People struggle to learn things, and then that knowledge is largely lost again, because web site authors lose interest or lose the battle with time, and the info goes out of date or goes lost entirely. Sometimes you can find old info in archives of mail lists, but then when what you find is incomplete or partially incorrect or obsolete, you can't go back and correct it or update it for the next guy.

So, wiki.

The intended scope of this wiki is information relating to pretty much any computer from Radio Shack. I personally am not very interested in many of the standard Intel/IBM PC clone machines, but I won't exclude that info if you want to add it.

Initially I'm just going to dump wiki versions of some various notes and recipes that I have been keeping in Google Drive and Google Photos, and even Facebook posts. And just start building a plain disorganized list of them here as an index. Over time, the organization can be improved, just as the content itself can. Hell, at first the "content" will just be links to the the Google Drive folders!

This info is wildly incomplete. It is intended to be filled-in over time, rather than be compiled and presented as a finished product. Those are called books, and they take years to write, and you hopefully get paid. I threw up this Digital Ocean droplet and dropped MediaWiki 1.28 on it and registered a couple domain names all in a few hours one night, and had to pay for the hosting and the domain. It is a place where anyone can place anything Tandy related, but does NOT claim to already have everything Tandy related. At first it will just have a few small things I personally have figured out and wish to document somewhere. What happens after that I don't really care that much. If no one else ever adds anything, that's fine. I'm still getting what I want, which is a better way to host things I want to document myself, than Google Drive folders!

But ideally, I hope to create a shared resource that outlives myself, and not just as a static copy. In 20 years, Half of the details I document today will be obsolete. In 20 years, the OSHPark and DigiKey links in an article that documents how to build a gadget today will be obsolete. A reader from that time should be able to hop in and update it with the current equivalent info, whatever that is at the time. An original article today might say "you can buy this gear here...", but tomorrow it should be able to be updated to "you can print this gear from this file...". It may, should even, still contain the original historical info for reference, but also updated info.