The “Valley of Information” I Ran Into
I am currently organizing transistor information from the 1950s through the 2010s — and in doing so, I’ve hit a wall.
Data from before 1980 is, somewhat surprisingly, easy to find.
– Printed databooks still exist.
– Libraries still have paper copies.
– Analog media physically survived.
But information from the 1990s to around 2010 is extremely difficult to collect.
You’d think that the “digital era” would be the easiest period to recover — but in reality, it is the most fragmented and the most lost.
– Storage media have deteriorated.
– Manufacturer websites were reorganized or shut down.
– CD-Rs and MOs have become unreadable.
– Personal homepages disappeared together with GeoCities and similar services.
After around 2013, things become easier again:
– Cloud storage became widespread.
– PDF distribution became the default.
– The Internet Archive and similar projects started keeping copies.
In other words, the 1990s to around 2010 form a “Valley of Information.”
And this valley is not something I’m experiencing alone — it is a pattern many people in many fields are noticing.
Why This Era in Particular Disappeared
1. Media Died Long Before We Expected
The primary recording media from roughly 1995 to 2010 turned out to have much shorter lifespans than advertised.
| Media (1995–2010 era) | Expected lifespan (advertised) | Lifespan often seen in reality |
|---|---|---|
| CD-R | “Up to 100 years” | Many unreadable after 5–15 years |
| DVD-R | “30-year class” | Media still exist, drives have vanished |
| ZIP / JAZ | “High reliability” | Media failures and drive faults were common |
| HDD | High MTBF on paper | Crashes in 5–8 years are not rare |
The media themselves betrayed our expectations.
2. Formats Outlived the Machines
Even when the discs or tapes survive, the hardware to read them does not.
– MiniDV / DVCAM / Hi8
– SmartMedia / xD-Picture Card
– SCSI HDDs
– 3.5-inch and 5-inch floppies
– DVD-RAM in cartridge form
If you can’t obtain the drive or the interface, the data is effectively gone, even if the media are still sitting in a drawer.
3. File Formats Appeared and Vanished
Around 2000 was a chaotic time before “standards” really settled in.
Formats that are already lost or disappearing:
– WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 documents
– RealAudio / RealVideo
– DivX 3 / Indeo codecs
– Flash / Shockwave content
– Obscure RAW formats for early digital cameras
– Proprietary project formats for audio and music production
The files may still exist, but the software is gone.
> Files without software are effectively dead data.
4. The Cloud Didn’t Exist Yet
Things that feel “obvious” in the 2020s:
– Google Drive
– Dropbox
– iCloud
– GitHub
– Home NAS with RAID
None of these were available to ordinary users around 2000.
– There was no widespread backup culture.
– Almost no one kept off-site copies.
Everything lived on:
– A single home PC
– A handful of optical discs
In practice, that meant:
> One PC failure = life-scale data loss.
5. The Illusion That “Digital Lasts Forever”
Those of us who grew up with analog media had a natural sense that “things decay, so you must preserve them.”
But many people in the early digital transition thought:
> Digital = no degradation → no need to worry
As a result, huge amounts of digital culture were lost:
– Family photos and videos
– First personal homepages
– Bulletin boards and early blogs
– Personal creative work
– University and lab data
– Internal CAD and documents in companies
The 1990s–2000s were:
– Not as durable as analog
– Not as safe as today’s cloud era
They were, in hindsight, the most dangerous transition period for data.
This data loss is a historical phenomenon.
A Double Rupture: Time and Language
The gap in technical information is not just about time. There is also a linguistic rupture.
The Japanese transistor databooks I own from the 1970s and 80s are not merely “information that is disappearing.”
They are, more accurately:
> Information the world never knew existed.
– Toshiba, Sanyo, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, NEC, Hitachi, SONY
– Detailed Japanese databooks published from the 1960s through the 1990s
– Most never translated into English
– Many now difficult to obtain even within Japan
Interestingly:
– Information on 1970s–80s Japanese transistors is still relatively well preserved in Japanese
– The same information barely exists in English
At the time, Japanese manufacturers produced highly detailed datasheets for the domestic market — but most of them were never translated.
We are dealing with two kinds of rupture:
Together, this double rupture makes vintage electronics information especially hard to obtain.
| Type of rupture | Cause |
|---|---|
| Temporal | 1990s–2010s “Valley of Information” |
| Linguistic | Gap between Japanese and English |
When I die, this information will most likely die with me.
If nothing is done, it will quietly be thrown away as “trash,” and the world will never even know what was lost.
Part Numbers Missing Even from the Big Archives
“Datasheets? Just check datasheets.com or alldatasheet.com. Everything is there, right?”
Many people think so — and to be fair, those sites are absolutely priceless.
Without them, many vintage repairs would be impossible.
But on my shelves, I have part numbers that do not appear even there.
Especially:
– Germanium transistors
– Minor Japanese-market-only parts
– Vintage devices from the 1950s–1980s
– A handful of special-purpose parts made for specific customers or government use
Search for these on datasheets.com and you’ll often see:
> “No results found.”
Even the world’s largest datasheet archives have gaps — and at least 100+ of those gaps are sitting in my bookcases right now.
Therefore, I Can Document What Others Cannot
For the 1990s to around 2010 — this “Valley of Information” — it may already be too late for many fields and many collections.
But I was there. I was actively buying transistors during that period.
So today, in my hands, I have:
– The historical context
– The physical parts
– The measurement data
And over the past 20+ years, I have:
– Hunted for databooks in second-hand bookstores
– Visited prefectural and university libraries across Japan
– Photocopied paper documents, page by page
– Slowly built up a private paper and measurement archive
In other words:
| Era | What I currently possess |
|---|---|
| 1950s–1980s | Japanese databooks that were never digitized or translated |
| 1990s–2010s | The actual parts plus my own measurement data |
| Across all eras | Information that, in this combination, exists nowhere else |
I don’t claim to be the only person in the world with such a collection.
But this combination of conditions is rare — perhaps even unique.
Maybe only 0.001% of people will ever actually need this information.
But as long as there is someone in that 0.001%, I will keep recording.
This is the mission of this archive.