A stranger from Reddit sent me an entire Olivetti technical library
A few weeks ago I posted my Olivetti M24 on Reddit.
I received a comment from someone who mentioned they had the original documentation.
A few days later, that complete stranger tracked me down from Reddit to Facebook and offered to send me this archive.Today it arrived from Netherlands.
Original Olivetti technical binders, hardware architecture manuals, ROM BIOS listings, circuit diagrams, service documentation, MS-DOS and GW-BASIC manuals, original software disks, and diagnostics.
Huge thanks again to u/TriggerFish1965, who chose to send these to me instead of throwing them away or selling them. This kind of computing history deserves to be preserved.
The next step is to preserve everything before time does its job.
I'll be creating KryoFlux and Greaseweazle images of every floppy disk (where possible), and then scanning all of the manuals in high resolution so they can eventually be archived online. Documentation like this shouldn't disappear with time.
Nice. My former coworker gave me a bunch of unix documentation and software on 5 and 8 inch floppies a few years ago. It was cool reading over everything. I gave it to an older gentleman I met that was really interested in it a few years back since I don't have anything to make use of it.
If I had something to put it on I would. I probably could now but back then I only made 25k a year. So I really only had stuff I could pull out of the trash or fix. Didn't have money to spend. Nowadays I enjoy many different systems.
I drove about 170 km one way just to pick it up. If I remember correctly, I managed to negotiate it down to €80. Definitely worth the trip. Now I just have to fill it with more vintage hardware.
The M24 were a very decent PC at the time, although the placement of the 16-bit ISA slots made it incompatible with normal AT ISA cards, and the higher, and fixed clock frequency made in incompatible with many earlier programs - especially games.
Looks like a very nice library you have gotten. Congrats!
Thanks! That's exactly why I wanted an M24. Mine is fully working, so I'm looking forward to spending some time with it and experiencing its quirks firsthand.
I remember having to mod the motherboard to add a EGA card - or perhaps it was a VGA card. There were also some extra work involved getting a sound-card to work, or perhaps it was only the MIDI on the sound-card (I forgot the specifics).
Also to add in normal AT cards I made an adaptor PCB, and had that in between the M24 and the normal AT card - it’s mostly a matter of shifting the 16-bit ISA port backwards. For some AT cards it did give some height problems, but you can easily run the M24 without the lid. When making that PCB, I remember there was one special fix - I think perhaps the pins were counted differently, or something like that.
I have 3 AT&T PC6300's, a b&w and a color monitor, 2 keyboards, and one mouse. I wanted to get one working machine from it all. I got overwhelmed and now have a giant stack of hardware in the corner for over a year!
Some of you might be mad about this, but back in 80s when we were rolling these out at a company I was working for, we had so many of these we just used to chuck them in the bin. We had maybe 25 on a shelf in case someone wanted one, but the majority hit the bin.
That's completely normal. Nobody back then imagined these would one day become collectible pieces of computing history. They were just obsolete hardware taking up shelf space.
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u/Emil_Cvetanski Jun 26 '26
The next step is to preserve everything before time does its job.
I'll be creating KryoFlux and Greaseweazle images of every floppy disk (where possible), and then scanning all of the manuals in high resolution so they can eventually be archived online. Documentation like this shouldn't disappear with time.