Buy the books here:
Volume 1: (mostly) European Tools and Techniques to the 1930s
Volume 2: (mostly) North American Climbing Tools and Techniques to the 1950s
My first gear catalogs I typed up in 1987 are a good reference for gear researchers (including me) to recall all the state of the art gear of the mid-1980s. I started A5 Adventures, Inc. company making hammers, but I also set up wholesale accounts with every possible climbing gear manufacturer to offer via mail-order the best and most specialised tools for efficient big wall climbing. A few tricks were being learned. I post these here as they are not anywhere else. I just found these old copies buried in some storage box and scanned them just now (2022):
1987 A5 Adventures Catalog

Believe it or not, the above was all stored on a memory typewriter, which involved arcane methods to re-edit to update prices, etc, but once stored, I could automatically type out more. Soon later I invested several thousand dollars in a Apple Macintosh SE, my first computer and a huge amount of money in those days. John McMullen came on board and began creating great bigwall art, so I learned how to typeset using Apple programs, and we started to lay out new cool catalogs.
1988 A5 Adventures “Pre-Season” Pricelist:

Catalogs 1 and 2 (1990/1) and 1996 (our last year)
Several old A5 Catalogs can be seen on bigwalls.net at http://www.bigwalls.net/d4-design.html
Bigwalls.net vs. Bigwalls.com
Be sure to also visit bigwalls.com which are the top “How-to” videos (bigwalls.com used to direct to bigwalls.net, but as I never had any “commerical” on the .com domain, I only really need bigwalls.net, which still offers archival and design information, so I gave Ryan the bigwalls.com domain.

This actually helps me set the date for production portaledges. I started making portaledges in 1987 and 1988, but at first only made a few with experimental features (Mugs Stump was one of our major product testers for his Alaska routes). The first production A5 portaledges were made for the Fall, 1988 season, and sold quickly, as there was a lot of pent-up demand.
Great post John, also thanks for donating the domain to Ryan! I know he is SUPER stoked enough about it!