About Passwords
by Roland Friestad

     There have been some questions and confusion about our use of passwords to open the PDF files for magazines, books and plans available for download from MODEL CLASSICS, DigitekBooks and SAM Speaks.
     As a model airplane "nut" all my life it has been a personal goal of mine to preserve from loss and make available as much of the history of model aviation and light aviation as possible.
     I am doing this by using high resolution digitzing and furnishing files primarily as PDF files. This is because PDF files are the most widely recognized and used format in the world and are likely to be supported long after other formats have fallen by the wayside.
     Many thousands of hours have been spent on this project and many people have donated time, magazines and books to help make it happen, but there is still much to do.
     We are now performing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on new files and working back to perform OCR on previous files. This makes searching for a name, word or phrase much faster than going through one page at a time.
     We normallly add a second page to books and magazines that identifies us as the source of the file. This enables those who see our files to contact us if they wish to see what else we have available.
     We are also adding passwords to magazine and book files. This is primarily so that the identification page that we normally insert just after the cover of each book or magazine cannot be easily removed, particularly by those who do that and then resell our work on eBay as their own.
     Feel free to copy and share the files but we would like to keep our identification page intact on books or magazines so folks can contact us and maybe even buy something.

Passwords for Periodicals

     Here's the way that Passwords work for magazines. It's really quite simple. Each magazine has an abbreviation tha we use to identifiy it. The password for magazines is always the abbreviation of the magazine followed by the year in which the issue was published.

SOME APPREVIATIONS

AT = AIR TRAIL

MB = MODEL BUILDER
FM = FLYING MODELS

MAN = MODEL AIRPLANE NEWS

MC = MODEL CLASSICS

AERO = AEROMODELLER
etc.

     Then a June 1937 issue of AIR TRAILS would have a password of --- "AT1937" and an October 1972 issue of MODEL BUILDER would have a password of --- "MB1972" and so forth.

Passwords for Non-Periodicals

      Passwords for books and other publications that are not periodical in nature are slightly different. The password is always the same as the filename which is the letter "D" followed by six numbers. So the password for the 1932 FLYING AND GLIDER MANUAL on page 22 of the December issue of MODEL CLASSICS would be "D001647". You can ignore anything following the six numbers after the letter "D"

     Note any book or non-periodical publication will show the password as the first seven characters when you attempt to open it.