[COFF] Commonality of 60s-80s Print Standards

[segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org>]

Good morning folks, I'm hoping to pick some brains on something that is troubling me in my search for some historical materials.

Was there some policy prior to mass PDF distribution with standards bodies like ANSI that they only printed copies of standards "to order" or something like that?  What has me asking is when looking for programming materials prior to when PDF distribution would've taken over, there's a dearth of actual ANSI print publications.  I've only come across one actual print standard in all my history of searching, a copy of Fortran 77 which I guard religiously.  Compare this with PALLETS'-worth, like I'm talking warehouse wholesale levels of secondary sources for the same things.  I could *drown* in all the secondary COBOL 74 books I see all over the place but I've never seen seen a blip of a suggestion of a whisper of an auction of someone selling a legitimate copy of ANSI X3.23-1974.  It feels like searching for a copy of the Christian Bible and literally all I can find are self help books and devotional readers from random followers.  Are the standards really that scarce, or was it something that most owners of back in the day would've thrown in the wood chipper when the next edition dropped, leading to an artificial narrowing of the amount of physical specimens still extant?

To summarize, why do print copies of primary standards from the elden days of computing seem like cryptids while one can flatten themselves into a pancake under the mountains upon mountains of derivative materials out there?  Why is filtered material infinitely more common than the literal rule of law governing the languages?  For instance the closest thing to the legitimate ANSI C standard, a world-changing document, that I can find is the "annotated" version, which thankfully is the full text but blown up to twice the thickness just to include commentary.  My bookshelf is starting to run out of room to accommodate noise like that when there are nice succint "the final answer" documents that take up much less space but seem to virtually not exist...

- Matt G.