What information can I find here?

My focus is on official hardware documentation for Apple Macintosh computers and peripherals. This includes, but is not limited to, Apple Developer Notes and Service Source documentation.

What formats do you use?

The best format for this sort of documentation is PDF. PDF preserves formatting and pagination, serves as a DMZ for embedded image formats, and can be decoded and viewed on the majority of legacy platforms.

Some older Apple documentation is available only in the form of scanned print volumes, which I am offering here as is, and in earlier digital documentation from Apple was distributed in Microsoft Word 4.0 for Macintosh format or Apple's proprietary DocViewer format, both of which pose problems on newer systems.

I have spent some time converting those early digital documents to PDF format, and fixing text encoding and font matching issues.

In addition, the embedded PostScript illustrations in some of Apple's earlier PDF documentation is illegible without the original fonts installed (and sometimes even then). So I have also spent some time fixing those problems. This process is ongoing as time allows.

Isn't this all available online already?

Yes. In the form of scores of separate files and archives and disk images, scattered across the web, with no uniform organizational structure or naming conventions. I'm trying to make it easier for collectors and hobbyists to learn more about their old Macs without wading through gigabytes of disk images and antique file formats, many of which do not open on a modern Mac.

How are the files organized and named?

I've divided them up in a logical manner, by CPU family (68K, PPC, and Intel) and form factor (desktop and portable). Servers have their own section, as they do on (some of) Apple's developer discs, as do peripherals, and development and reference platforms. Ancillary documentation is sorted into a few arbitrary folders.

Naming is done, as much as possible, by concatenating the title from the title page of the document, any subtitle in parentheses, then the date of publication/release, in YYYY-MM-DD format. Revision numbers are also included in document names where available or relevant. I have preserved all available revision of each document.

While I've taken pains to make this site usable with even the earliest of browsers, in a few cases (G4 PowerBook Technical Notes, I'm looking at you) this convention has led to rather long filenames, which may exceed the 32-character filename length limitation of the classic Mac OS. Your browser or FTP client should be able to truncate those names while downloading them.

Where's the software, software documentation, third party documentation, etc.?

Not here, for the most part. I'm more interested in hardware documentation. It is my intention to collect some of the interesting and useful software distributed on the Developer CDs from 1989 to 1994 (ish), eventually, and I may also work on making the Tech Info Library navigable on this site as well. Eventually.

In any case, sites such as archive.org, The Macintosh Garden, and The Macintosh Repository, are better set up to host software for download (and somewhat poorly set up to host the kind of information I'm trying to organize here).

Does this site validate?

Haaahaahahahahaahaa. No. The goal is for this to work, and look passable, in browsers at least as far back as Mosaic 2.0. So, no encryption, no CSS, no Javascript, only least-common-denominator HTML, and a few very ugly deprecated tags from the days of the browser wars.

Rant: many websites don't actually need encryption, and it's silly for encryption to be considered mandatory for personal websites and such. If nobody's logging into anything on your site, and it doesn't deal with secure information, please consider not encrypting, so people using older browsers, legacy platforms, and so on, can still use your site.