Sad News - greendyk.nl Website Closing Down

[Eric Rechlin]

Good news.

I, too, was extremely disappointed to see that the amazing greendyk.nl site was being shut down last year. The author clearly spent countless hours painstakingly and faithfully recreating the manuals, even going as far as to redraw many of the graphics.

In the days before the site shut down, I manually clicked on every page (to avoid being IP-banned with an automatic downloader) and saved just about every file and image on the site. This took me tens of hours. I saved my last files just minutes before the site went down.

Unfortunately, because the site was dynamically generated, what I had left over wasn't a functioning site. When pages were similar, I didn't save the extra copies (like for the navigation bar frames) in order to save precious time, so I knew those would have to be recreated. Because of the tremendous effort that would take, I set aside the files until this summer, when I finally had a chance to work on it.

What I have now done is pieced together all the files to make a functioning site again. It's a completely static site, so it's suitable for offline use. Even the original site had a number of 404 errors, but I have fixed all of these. In a few cases I might have missed some pages (like some title pages between sections), but I have adjusted links so that those are no longer needed. In the original site, on some of the manuals, individual pages were not directly linkable or bookmarkable, so I restructured the pages a little in order to allow this functionality.

Also, I noticed that the original site had a substantial number of typographical errors. I would guess about 95% were mistyped and 5% were OCR errors. I went through all the pages and fixed probably 2000 typos -- nearly every page had at least one typo, and some had a double-digit number.

Not only did I restore all 8 of the HP calculator/computers manuals, and all 7 of the HP-41C accessory manuals, but I also restored the guestbook, the Hemmi's sliderule manual, the Fender Telecaster pages and the page about the Thunderbirds television show. The only deficiency there was that I was missing some pages from the Telecaster manual, which I neglected to download, but another forum member here had saved it was able to provide to me the HTML, and I was able to recreate most of the images (with only 3 exceptions, in which I substituted placeholders) by using other materials I found on the web.

And most importantly, the HP-65 emulator and the software libraries for it are now entirely functional, too.

So I have made an attempt to restore the site to be almost exactly the way it was just before it was shut down, but actually even better.

Here is the new site:

https://archived.hpcalc.org/greendyk/

If you would like to download the entire site for offline use, the zip file is linked on https://archived.hpcalc.org/. Then it can never disappear forever.

If you have any problems with the site, please let me know. Also, if you saved anything that I am missing, I would appreciate that as well. I will also be continuing to fix typos as they are reported.