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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Hewlett Packard archives not being digitised would be a very cruel kind of irony.

Shouldn't this kind of stuff be in a museum?

Agree. This is really inexcusable. I just had my college and high school papers and letters digitized at 4 cents a page (8 cents a page if the machine detects writing on the other side). Ironically it’s a place in East Bay that’s receiving a lot of business due to the fires. The standard industry grade machines can scan 60 pages per minute and provide basic OCR. Higher power machines can apparently do 600 pages per minute. So, a box of papers containing about 2500 pages would be $100 and take a professional 45 minutes. It’s too bad this wasn’t digitized and put online or in a museum, like the ones Wells Fargo have in their major flagship bank locations. I guess banks want to show a 100-year history whereas it’s not a selling point for tech.

Where is this? I've been a hobbyist writer since I was 3 and really want to get all my stuff digitized.

There's an older fellow named Wade who runs a place called "Print Scan Duplicate" in Richmond, CA. He scanned in about 4000 pages for me and it was a little over $300 because there were a ton of staples to remove, about 800 were in color, and he created PDF files based on groupings. https://www.printscanduplicate.com/pricing

> Where is this? I've been a hobbyist writer since I was 3 and really want to get all my stuff digitized.

You learned to write when you were 3?

Early but not totally implausible. My mother taught me to read when I was four and I could write before I was five. It was a pain at school where I had to endure a couple of years of reading simple John and Jane books while everyone else was catching up. Unfortunately, while I could write, I never developed the technical skill of writing legibly and fast so even I have difficulty in deciphering quite a lot of my writing. More than thirty five years of using computers to create documents hasn't improved things either.

When one of our kids was around 3, we would write down the stories that he would dictate, which he would then illustrate. It was a lot of fun and I'm glad we still have those.

I was reading to my kindergarten class when I was 4, self-taught (lots of Sesame Street and Electric Company), and I am not remotely brilliant.

I can certainly believe someone writing at 3, although it's pretty damned impressive.

Whoops, I forgot, I could write at 3. My aunt loves to tell the story of how she got me to finally talk by making me ask for a Coke, after discovering I could read and write.

Haha, of course it wasn't any good! But yes I was reading (terribly) and "writing" (awfully) at age 3.

I trade a remarkably early start in literacy for literally 0 math skills.

For what it's worth, they were authored before digitization was feasible, and they were collected before it was cheap. I can see why, but it's sad to see.

Being in a museum is not enough. ALL historical records, artifacts or similar should be digitized.

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