I need help!! I’m trying to locate archived info on past years matches. I have already been to the FIRSTwiki site and the FIRST-a-holics site (I got most of my info from that site). I’m missing info from 1994-1996. Can anyone help me? I’m trying to compose a FIRST history sheet for our team since approx 95% of the team I’m working with are Freshman. Does anyone have any connections or old manuals that are collecting dust that can help me out? thanks 
I recently found a box of old materials lying around at deka, i have been working on getting clearance to digitize the video and make the material public. i will make it available as soon as i can.
Since you are in Manchester i would also suggest you go over to FIRST and check out the things they have there.
A good person to talk to about that would be “AmyPrib” shes the leader of our current history project.
Yep - we’ve been going through 15yrs of FIRST/TechnoKat history and have everything under the sun (just about). I believe we’ve got almost every year’s game manual, team lists, regional and natls award winners, event programs, rule updates, etc. Most of it’s been scanned or already electronic.
What exactly are you looking for? I’ll get to posting some files, probably in White Papers for those years competition manuals.
Edit - Ok, I lied. The electronic files I have for these are 4-11mb and won’t compress too much. Can’t post to white papers. Look out for lots of history info (docs/video/photo) on the technokats.org site early next year.
Wow… didn’t expect that quick of a response… Basically I’m doing a quick hit on each year… what the game was, weight and size restrictions on the robot and any interesting info on the game, like anything that stood out in the game, etc… thanks for the quick responses…
Can you say WAYBACKMACHINE?
Go to http://web.archive.org
enter www.usfirst.org and VIOLA! Old manuals, old rules, old results, updates, you name it…
It is AMAZING!
Happy digging.
More folks really need to know about the waybackmachine.
Joe J.
OH MY GOODNESS, I LOVE YOU!!! That is SOO cool!!! Thank you… this will help with my hunting
Joe - what an awesome link… now we just have to consolidate alot of this historic stuff together somehow.
Amy - I would love to see what you guys have from the past. I’ve been doing some site cleaning and tried to categorize alot of the old stuff at our place for our site museum.
Ellery
This is precisely what we are doing currently… Consolidating everything by year, organizing, sifting, sorting, etc. Working as fast as we can - 15yrs is a lot of stuff to dig through. It’s all been organized, we have almost everything scanned into electronic files, and have almost all 100+vhs tapes converted to dvd. Much of this stuff will go on our website once it’s compiled. I’m guessing we have just about everything anyone would want to see. We might just have a kiosk in our pit as well… this is still under construction. Will try to let everyone know when our site is updated so it can be mobbed. 
ps. there’s some stuff that I pulled from wayback machine also, esp event results/awards. While we have a lot of this stuff in our file cabinets, I am trying to pull as much as I can from other places too to fill any holes. Ideally it’ll be one massive history resource.
I have no idea how I stumbled upon this page (everytime I try to retrace what links I clicked on, it never works again), but I was able to find a page in the Internet Archive that lists every single file they have archived for a particular website. Archive.org says that they have 21976 records stored from the FIRST website. Here’s the link:
Sidenote: I found it rather amusing to look up NASA’s first homepage update…
Just out of curiosity, why are you looking up information from so many year’s ago? Trying to figure out what this game will be based on past precident???
From the 7 yrs give or take that I have been in some part of FIRST, there has been some small part of a past year game. One thing I always say is that you can’t look forward until you look back. It helps the kids that have never seen anything about FIRST see what works and what doesn’t. I have found that it is a great thing for our strategy and design group to see also.
Anne Bergeron and Steve Shade put together a FIRST History powerpoint for the Enrichment Sessions we had for the teams here in MD/DC (and we played FIRST Jeopardy.) They talked about what worked and what didn’t each year, and new things introduced. They can be reached thru [email protected]
Direct links are better, even thought it may not be the same presentation. :ahh:
FIRST History - Andy Baker, Steve Shade, & Andy Grady
Powerpoint Format
Right click>Save Target As… - Much faster than waiting for a powerpoint presentation to open in a web browser.
Courtesy of the 2004 Championship presentations series.
Everything that everyone has given me so far has been great!! I’m still hunting for info on just 1994 and 1995… but I have faith that I will find it soon… thanks again for the help!!!