I was in Google Patent Litigation, and we actively collected old stuff, for possible use as prior art. I even went to Beryl Nelson's house before she died to collect her old Bell System Technical Journals.
A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone. That can be hard to accept, but it's true. Even old wood furniture -- no one wants it. Old PC or Byte Magazines? Forget it; they're all over.
> Even old wood furniture -- no one wants it. Old PC or Byte Magazines? Forget it; they're all over.
I think the former is pretty true, but old PC magazines are still important to keep around.
For one, they can be digitized to take up virtually no physical space (unlike furniture). Secondly, once digitized and OCR'd to make searchable, they're a valuable resource for finding out when certain products or technologies became available, for what cost, and sometimes include contemporary reviews.
In the more distant future I think there will be some value placed on historical tech in much the same way people still spend time researching medieval times and earlier. Having access to these documents will be important for future researchers and whatever their goals may be at that time. Furniture - less so. :)
Rather the reverse. Any publication is easily available in PDF. Real solid furniture is nearly impossibly to find new. Everthing is particleboard and vaneers, or if higher end, mdf and veneers.
It always was expensive. Most people couldn't buy them, and if they had them, they'd pass them on for generations.
The difference is that today people don't think their grandkids will want to take decades old furniture in old style. They will probably live very far anyway and things change fast. Expectations and lifestyles are just different now.
There are multiple ongoing efforts to find or sometimes recreate media which has been lost to time, including media which was originally published only digitally. The difference is that I can make new furniture which looks similar to or even indistinguishable to older pieces, but it becomes quite difficult (essentially impossible) to recreate for example, early episodes of Doctor Who. In general, I'd have to say it's irresponsible to not at least look to see if someone else has a good quality digital copy first - surprisingly often, they do not.
What? I bought a bed last year. It’s solid wood, only the bottom of the under-bed-drawers being some kind of glued material. And it wasn’t even some super high-end thing, including the drawers, I paid just below 1000 € for it.
When searching for a bed to buy (as I wanted solid wood), I even found many stores specializing in solid wood furniture.
There's a big difference between "no-one" and "not enough people to make it worthwhile storing and transporting large and heavy furniture so it can be sold at a reasonable price". Friction is a thing.
and not of us live in cities with furniture showrooms. The nearest stores with halfway decent stuff are like 3 hours from here - and that's just to look, never mind the hassles of arranging
I'm actually in the middle of getting a custom computer/music desk shipped cross country right now. Not solid wood either, and the thing still cost almost $2k with shipping.
As a woodworker I would love to grab a goalpost and drag it 30 meters further down the field - pine is not wood, pine is an organic cardboard with superior strength and durability to cardboard, but is otherwise the same material.
(You did make your point though. I just really vehemently dislike pine as a building material for furniture)
The problem there is figuratively with the posts. Screwing a board to a metal U is easy. Nicely joining 4 wooden legs to the board is not... I have also done the former multiple times, with custom-made lower parts and it is very painful to see highpriced cr* like the one in the link popping up everywhere, where it could easily be made custom (even in relatively High-CoL locations) for nearly the same price. The thing above is 30€ for steel, 2h of manual work (where the non welding prep of sawing metal pieces can be done by anyone... I did this for a trapezoidal shape of my own design...), next to nothing for painting (powdercoat would be nice, but likely not done...) and then a plank of some random wood from Ukraine (30€, 200€ if you construct it custommade from planks). I gather the main problem lies with the availability of designs and likely this could be solved by providing those (for example by an IT platform selling plans and matching suppliers with customers).
I think the point is that it's already been digitized. All of it. The stuff in your attic isn't a valuable historic artifact; it's deep in the trough of no value.
A fraction has been digitized, and most of it still quite poorly scanned.
Try reading some, try actually using any of the schematics and other technucal drawings, a lot looks ok at a glance, then turns out to be merely better tgan nothing when you actually try to use it the same way you would have used the original.
Every few years the definition of practical scanner quality and file size increases by 2x or more. A fax quality scan is infinitely better than nothing, so it's great that such scans were made as soon as that became possible, but a few years later scanners became 10x better and it became practical to work with 10x larger file sizes. So all of those documents really need to be scanned again. And the same process needs to hapoen yey again at least one more time. Even very good scans from only a few years ago are still only good compared to old scans. They are still practically garbage compared to the original print.
And much of what is currently digitized is precarious, one lawsuit or lapse in funding or ceo decision away from the service being shut down.
I've already lost tons of stuff I actually paid for to services that no longer exist, let alone free services.
Right now a lot of eggs are in archive.org and they are a charity that paints a huge "kill me" target on their own back every day. It makes no sense to operate on the assumption they will never become the library of alexandria.
Digitizing existing printed material is not remotely a done job. Not even barely scratched the surface if you step back and look at how we are still in the first few seconds of eternity.
You'd be surprised how little of the niche pre-internet stuff is digitized. There are some exceptions (national-circulation newspapers, some English-language books), but it's a minority of what's been published.
People have absolutely no idea how niche things were - every city of moderate size (maybe a million?) had an independent computer magazine of some sort, some literally mimeographed pages stapled together, others flashy magazine quality productions.
And they had columnists and journalists and everything. Heady time.
And I'm not sure I can go online and find a complete set of Byte Magazine much less the Boston Computer Society newsletter or something even more niche.
Probably I could find a lot of stuff if I went to enough libraries but it certainly isn't all available and nicely indexed on the open web.
Yeah, I had grand plans. I even did one issue, and OCR'd it as well, but then COVID happened and work got busy and now you can fast-forward four years when I've moved countries again, hopefully for the last time. I know where they are, which is good. Need to disassemble the book-edge scanner and clean the underside of the glass off because it's all fogged. I also need to stand up a VM that can talk to the crappy OpticBook drivers. And I'm behind on my start-of-season farm work, which keeps expanding fractally the deeper I go. That dependency stack is what's in my way at the moment.
It would've been courteous to offer it back to the donor, if they weren't equipped or willing to archive or distribute it. I'm guessing that's probably not standard practice, but surely it's common for people donate things to be archived because they're in some way important to the donor.
It's what any minimally civilized adult does in any context, to respect someone else's efforts or valuables regardless if a thing is valuable to yourself. At least enough to try to give it back. At least enough to warn "hey, I'm just going throw this away".
It sounds like what happened here is individual turnover, where the entity that accepted the material is not the same entity that discarded the material.
It's still a vcf failure though, not a blameless accident.
As an organization they accepted a task and then did not do it. An individual leaving should not cause that. We invented writing and institutional knowledge thousands of years ago. And the organization certainly retains the benefits of the ongoing organizational continuity.
If anyone would say that turnover excuses anything, then I say that can only be valid if the organizations name and other assets also all evaporate at the same time as their obligations and agreements evaporate. You don't get to shed one and keep the other!
So it's fair to just judge the organization for committing this act the same as you would a person. Never trust them again with anything you care about. And as in Jason's case where he particularly cares about specifically preserving documents, and so is particularly burned by someone dropping that specific ball they agreed to take from him specifically, in his case it's totally fair for him to not want to even associate at all with them ever again, even if we all don't have to go that far.
They burned him especially badly, retroactively made him fail at a job he has set himself, by giving him a thumbs up we got this but then pissing on the work.
That makes Jason into a bad steward since he trusted them. He's not really a bad steward of course but it doesn't change the fact that what he set out to accomplish, and a responsibility he himself accepted from yet others before him, has failed. Not everyone has to care so much about some old magazines, but he does, and VCF knew he does, and we all benefit from the fact that there are people like him out there. So I say it's totally reasonable that he writes them off as dead to him. That is a correct and rational and even constructive reaction for him.
As he says in the article, he now has much more robust conversations on this. That's constructive.
I think it is constructive to tell everyone too.
Nothing wrong with VCF having to work hard and earn back a good name. And nothing wrong with everyone watching and being aware if they fail to.
Yes, they should have tried to give it back or, ideally, just not accepted in the first place absent a concrete plan. And, yes, it's worth understanding that not everyone (including university archives as well as volunteer organizations) has the level of enthusiasm about donated physical "stuff" as you do even when you think they really should for whatever reason.
However, as someone involved in an archiving project with a volunteer organization which changes people around a lot, I understand all too well that dealing with boxes of magazines like this is tough. If they're already scanned, great; the paper itself has very little value especially if you're not a library of some sort. If they're not, you're probably asking an organizations to spends multiple $10Ks to scan.
I'd expect people working in a organization focused on preserving or promoting vintage stuff to be the most enthusiastic about that material and handle it with great care.
My mom couldn't care less about computers and she called me to ask if I wanted to keep some floppy disks before she threw them out.
>My mom couldn't care less about computers and she called me to ask if I wanted to keep some floppy disks before she threw them out.
And I've thrown out a ton of floppies and old games. You can't save everything just because it had some meaning to you once.
Enthusiastic or not, dealing with boxes and boxes of old magazines means spending lots of money and/or lots of time which is a high bar. (Though, as I wrote, they should have either just said no or returned it.)
I am very clearly agreeing with Jason that the organization has demonstrated itself to be entirely disorganized. The opposite of optimistic.
I have addressed the excuse of turnover already. It isn't one.
But even if it were an excuse, that still goes poof when the organization discovers that they dropped a ball that someone else trusted them with and handled something so poorly, and tries to deny any cuplability and even tries to bash Jason back, instead of saying "Shit, we didn't know because we're all new here since then. We feel terrible that this happened!"
That would cost zero cents to have done, but it was still too much.
I agree, but that also requires cataloging the donation somehow so that the donor's contact information is associated. If it all lived in the boxes until it was removed (however it was) then it would be easy to have said 'hey, we can't use this, and we can't store it, we're planning to rid ourselves of it, can you help us find it a new home?' Especially if the donor had placed contact info inside or on the boxes.
But there's lots of ways that information may not filter to the big pile of old magazines disintegrating in the salt air.
Seems reasonable enough! But if that's your take, I recommend not accepting 15 crates of material Jason Scott drives 70 miles from his house to hand off to you, unless you're looking to get Internet Famous.
Few places is that truer than in libraries. I worked in that world for quite some time. Many people are astonished to find out how many books libraries pulp. Periodicals? Forget it. Space, preservation budgets, cataloging resources, and any number of other things required to maintain collections of objects is finite, so you need to focus on things people want to read/watch/listen to/use. The important stuff gets saved. We put a 40k book collection into a salt mine after digitizing it, because it was of international historical significance and the only known complete collection of its type. Most of the stuff though wasn't even interesting enough to make it onto the free book cart for staff.
It really opened my eyes to the fact that most of what you value or hold dear will have no value to others, especially if it can't be resold. As a practical minimalist (rather than a strict one) it's informed my personal practices a fair bit.
I like going to estate sales. Sometimes you find interesting things.
But mostly, it's just piles of, frankly, crap. And in a weird way, it's sort of helping me deal with some of my tendencies to collect crap. Once I'm dead, 75% of it will be thrown away by someone hired to deal with the estate, maybe 50% of the rest will be sold, and the rest will once again go in the garbage. That screwdriver I'm keeping even though it doesn't work well? It's going in the landfill anyway. Might as well go tomorrow, as in 50 years.
I've gotten rid of almost everything I own twice by moving 7000 miles twice. I regret it.
Books, toys, trinkets, etc. I saw these, thought "I haven't opened these or touched them since I bought them". Turns out, there were memories associated with each one. Just seeing them would remind me of a time and a place. What I was doing, who my friends were, where I was, then I bought that thing. They all sat on bookshelves and I threw them away. I suppose I can go look at a picture of the shelves but it's not the same as glancing at them and having them trigger memories.
Tools, and supplies. I recently moved to a smaller apartment. I had a few boxes of things like left over parts from assembling furniture from 2 apartments previous. The day after I threw them out I needed them. All this stuff I have, 3 kinds of hole punchers, 4 kinds of tape (electrical, duct, masking, cellophane), a rarely need any of them except for maybe the cellophane. If I went by when "have I used it in the last 3 years I'd have thrown the first 3 away. But, that one day when I need it I'll be glad to have it. Same goes for various kinds of bandages, cooking utensils, boardgames, stationary supplies, gift wrapping supplies, ....
Another good example might be clothing. Yes, I do throw things away. But, there are various items I haven't used in years, long jeans for snow, high top hiking boots, thick socks, rash guards, etc.. that if I go by "have I used it recently" then I'd throw them out.
I'm not saying keep everything and no, no one will want this stuff. But, seeing both grandfathers basically have a maker-space full of stuff, and use it, makes me jealous that I didn't stick in one place and slowly build up my dragon horde of stuff too :P
When my hoarder FIL died, we had to have a cleanup company deal with his apartment - we asked them to set aside anything of value and got back one bankers box of old utility bills, canceled checks, a laptop. In reality, since those things held the clues to tracking down the bits of his estate, they probably were worth more than any revered artifact.
I was surprised at how low some things were at my parents' estate sale, though they're still alive and kept some things downsizing to assisted living. I also did keep some things of value (or that I could see immediate use for, like replacing my dishes with my mom's massive amount of Corelle including discontinued items).
Also if you know people starting out suggest that they visit an estate sale or two for dishes, pans, silverware, etc.
And anyone who wants fine china should just go buy people's complete sets on the last day for $15 or less.
Sure, but I don't think I need two phillips' heads that would be more useful as dagger side-arms from the 15th century than they would be for screwing or unscrewing anything.
I finally got fed up and replaced them and threw them away after I grabbed two in a row that didn't actually get the job done.
A pile of items, sorted by the owner, has information in how it is organized that gives it value beyond the sum of the resale value. And the moment someone else sees that pile, it's a pile of crap.
This is what terrifies me about getting a brain operation. To me, my brain is my universe ... but while I am drugged out and wide open on a table, my brain is just 8 pounds of fruit punch they are debating whether has spoiled. Who would champion its value without my own presence?
I live in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire. I have to drive a 2 hour round trip to get a specific brass screw, if I can't find one in my pile of crap in the woodshop's cabinets of drawers of boxes of envelopes. If I died, someone would toss all of it into a metal recycling scrap bin for 8 cents per pound. But to me it's worth 8 dollars per ounce, because of the information I have stored in it that no one else can access.
It's the same general reason why my work desk is a mess to everyone but me; but I can earn a livelihood out of the state of my desk, my files, my folders.
I think I wrote this reply for only myself but I sure got a boost out of it.
Nobody wanting old wood furniture is a boon for people looking to get nice furniture on the cheap. Check Facebook marketplace, craigslist, wherever people sell used things near you. Furniture doesn't really wear out, so other than a few scuffs and dings it will probably be just like new (except for things like couches or recliners). I managed to get a Henredon dresser that retails for something like $4000 new for $400. All you need is a truck or van and a friend to help you move it.
I’ve had the opposite experience. Offer stuff for free and you will have to deal with the flakiest, most unreliable people in the world. They’ll say they’re going to come pick it up, leave you waiting all afternoon, and then just ghost you.
Ask at least a token amount and you will get someone who seriously wants it.
Adding an anecdatum to the pile, my one and only experience with offering a (nice but unloved by the other occupant) chair for free got a response in the first 5 minutes who then arranged a courier to pick it up the following week. Painless.
Well I was giving away our coffee table. A very interested lady who was going to pick it up have held us home for better part of the day with half-hour postponements and then said it's too much trouble.
Relisted it for $20 and the next week it went painlessly.
I live at the end of a long driveway off a fairly busy road. I've had very good luck leaving a chair or old lawn equipment at the end of the driveway with a free sign. Gone within a few hours.
This is what I do, for Craigslist instead of posting in free I'll post in the category with a $1 price and say free in the description. Free is scanned by desperate people looking to make easy money. Due to competition, that requires being first to claim stuff, well before you are sure you can find a buyer for it.
> A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone. That can be hard to accept, but it's true. Even old wood furniture -- no one wants it. Old PC or Byte Magazines? Forget it; they're all over.
In a marketplace we might say that something has the value someone else is will pay for it. In case of donations like these it's somewhat tricky, it has the value someone is willing to take good care of it and preserve it. That's why it hurts in a way, they threw it away so it signals: that it had no value that's not even worth calling the person to pick it back up.
I've seen this happen with my own family. Some older family member thinks their collectables they have been saving are super valuable, only to find out that nobody in the family wants them. That's painful for them to accept that, understandably, so it has to be handled with care.
Another thing to think about is if it matters if it's Jason Scott. Should they have marked the boxes specially and treated the contents with a lot more care just because of who he is? That would have probably been smart from a PR standpoint. Maybe there is a chance some volunteer didn't know who Jason Scott is? But it would seem equally silly to now come out and say, sorry we didn't know it was you, Jason, we would have called back or kept them otherwise.
>> seen this happen with my own family. Some older family member thinks their collectables they have been saving are super valuable, only to find out that nobody in the family wants them
I've said this before, but it bears repeating.
The joy of collections comes in the collecting, not the final collection. Nobody wants to inherit "someone else's collection" - they want to collect themselves.
Secondly, 95% of your collection has little to zero value. 4% has some value. Perhaps 1% has significant value. There's a power law in play here. I -urge- you to turn the valuable parts into cash yourself before you pass. The coat of -identifying- the valuable parts dwarfs their value.
Therefore when you pass, your survivors will either give it away for nothing, or sell to a dealer for the price of transport. More likely it'll go to the dump. If this pains you then -dispose it yourself-.
If you have prized parts, those 5 items in a sea of thousands, make sure they are stored separately, clearly labeled and done one knows about them. They will then at least get donated. If you think they have value that can be realised -then you must dispose it yourself-.
Collecting usually occurs in a niche community, so who is selling matters.
A well known collector finally parting with their prize pieces everyone has been drooling over for 40 years is going to yield a greater return than a stranger walking in with the same items looking for quick cash.
In my life, it's that the only people with room to have large wooden furniture were the Boomers and their parents who could afford to live in 2.5k+sq foot houses. My whole apartment couldn't hold the furniture from my parents living room.
As I wrote this I am on holiday, having bought an old Singer Sewing table, complete with foot-power mechanism. It's a lovely bit of furniture.
That said, where to put it (or more accurately, what it will replace) was very much part of the buying decision. (Fortunately it comes apart, so can fit in the car. )
But the author is right. Old furniture in homes is rare. Partly because there are a LOT more homes now (so less old furniture to go round) and partly because it takes time, and money, to furnish in a consistent "old furniture style".
It can also be -really- expensive. So becomes something of a "later in life" activity when funds allow.
Typically a bunch arrives on the market at once, so typically it goes to a dealer, and between transport, storage, sales etc, the estate won't get much.
When my grandmother passed, she left a house full of all this furniture, china, antiques and various knickknacks that she wanted her family to split up amongst themselves. Only her children (my Boomer parents and aunts) wanted any of it. The cousins in my generation and younger didn’t want any of it. We have nowhere to store all this… stuff. Our generation can barely afford space to live let alone rooms dedicated to antiques and dishwear.
I hope my parents don’t burden us with a storage unit full of junk. Just because they treasure it doesn’t mean we can or even want to become the next stewards of it. It’s all going to the landfill.
My grand parents had a lot of dishes/furniture/photos/books that they saved for us to inherit. For a while, we tried to let them know we weren't interested and we encouraged them to sell it or donate it, but they either couldn't part with it or wanted us to have it.
We realized the best solution was just to express thanks and gratefulness to them and then just give/sell to a junk disposal/reseller guy after they passed.
From personal experience, other people's storage units that are filled with stuff kept against an ill-defined future just cost money and cause someone else a headache sooner or later.
In the first post he absolves a certain guy, so I’d guess it’s just a matter of someone in the org thinking they were valuable, only for the next guy to come to a different conclusion.
It's very easy to imagine one guy being enthusiastic about this and possibly even thinking that digitizing the issues wouldn't be a big deal. And then after he moved on, someone else going What is all this crap? Not even knowing where it came from. And sure as heck not about to undertake a large-scale digitization project.
> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? The reason why people don't cherish these types of things is they are rational. Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday
This reply hanging off a thread about prior art is telling.
As surprising as it may be, the past can tell a lot about the future, as the past was present at a point, and the future is now.
Take an example about AI. This past couple of years isn't the first time that AI had been a hot topic. Look back to the late 80's -- there was a lot of research into it and lots of predictions about how the world would change -- but that didn't happen. It definitely didn't affect the general public as has today. So why is that? Looking at the different circumstances between the past and today (i.e., increase in computing power, availability of networks and broadband, general availability of computing devices, etc. etc.) could then be used to predict the future.
Looking back at the past can give hints about what the future may hold.
waves in the general direction of all the millions of books about history and all the history classes we've had in school and all the people studying history and all the history channels on YouTube or TikTok or all the history subreddits
What does that even mean? Our history is important to us. Full stop.
since I wrote that: it's actually pretty rare that a defendant can actually use a piece of prior art in a case, but there's always a hope that ONE time, you will.
The other difficulty is that lawyers and jurors will make fun of anything that's too old. I know, it isn't fair, but you do have to overcome a built-in bias against ancient stuff.
I realize you're not talking about litigation, but that was what I meant.
In the original post he mentions that he purchased the containers specifically for the purpose of the donation, so it's likely that the containers sat full for years after being donated and were only incidentally re-used.
He also mentions that the person who originally accepted the donation was pushed out of the VCF organization, and did not have a say in the material being disposed of.
There is a possibility here that the containers sat for years after they were accepted, no one was left who knew why they contained a bunch of papers, and so they thought it wouldn't be a big problem if they disposed of the papers. Being a supposedly archival organization, however, if this was the case it would have been very poor judgememt.
I'm the kind of person who keeps random marketing materials from obscure gadgets from 40 years ago, so I can feel the pain of these documents having been lost.
That being said, once a donation is made, in general, is there an obligation to uphold any wishes of the donator? I guess there is, in many circumstances.
That's an interesting ethical question. I am tempted to agree that there generally is.
You can argue that the giving of a gift is a final act, that the gifted item belongs to the recipient now, and that since you're morally free to do whatever you want with what belongs to you, you are free to do with the gift as you please, including tossing it out.
But gifting is imbued with meaning beyond the mere transfer of ownership. This is obviously true in the case of gifts between people: tossing out a sweater hand-knit for you by your grandma is at the very least an asshole move, and I would argue that it's just wrong because it would cause her pain to know that. The sweater has meaning beyond being a mere sweater; particularly so because of the care with which it was made. A collection like the one we're discussing was likely accumulated with care, it held meaning beyond the economical value of the magazines or journals that constituted it.
Some donations (especially monetary?) are made with not so much care that it matters; but an extensive collection of magazines, by a person invested in the community, to an organization that is supposed to archive (and continue a legacy of looking after old stuff), to me fits in the same ethical landscape of the sweater gift - even if the receiving party is an organization rather than an individual, even if it's a "donation" rather than a "gift". I think we usually displace ethical agency away from organizations, especially for-profit companies, but they should be held accountable for their actions towards the community they supposedly serve (or service). A duty to not be assholes was violated.
> You can argue that the giving of a gift is a final act, that the gifted item belongs to the recipient now, and that since you're morally free to do whatever you want with what belongs to you, you are free to do with the gift as you please, including tossing it out.
Gifts/donations can be conditional, subject to conditions. If someone donates $1 million to a university to fund scholarships for disadvantaged students, and the university instead decides to spend it all on first class air travel for university executives, that would in many jurisdictions be illegal (a breach of trust).
If someone donates an item to a museum, I would say the museum has at least a moral obligation to contact the donor and ask them if they want to take it back before throwing it out.
I believe the person quit the organization, wasn't pushed out.
At one point in time there was problems with the storage space that VCF has. I believe it was fixed. VCF is not a wealthy organization, and is hosted by another underfunded organization. Needs capital to renovate for expansion but it's slow going.
> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? The reason why people don't cherish these types of things is they are rational. Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday
The full stupidity of this is only clear when you realise that almost everything that is considered "technology" today was invented between the 1950s and 1970s. Most of what is invented today is about refinement and scaling of ideas that were developed many decades ago.
>The reason why people don't cherish these types of things is they are rational. Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday
You can't built tomorrow if you don't understand and appreciate yesterday.
Without knowing the past you can and will be taken for a ride by any con man selling you old bullshit as fancy new stuff of tomorrow.
Without knowing the past they can and will sell you crappy stupid stuff which you'll gulp down just because its new and shiny, because you don't know that better stuff already existed.
If someone is not passionate about the history and development of their field, I seriously doubt they're a good fit for it.
> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing
The machine that defined our era, and did it so quickly that we realized what was happening and actually had a chance to interview some of the people who kicked it off, and a few of those folks are still alive.
Would you close every museum? What about a museum of old steam engines? Is there a line, or do you simply not see any value in history?
> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing?
Sure, no need to study history. Just pull to refresh every second and don't remember anything. And also, defund the national archives too, they are apparently useless.
No this group wastes so much time trying to relive the 70's and 80's they're missing an even greater paradigm shift unfolding right here and now. Someone has to say enough with the tinkering already. It's a waste of time. Yesterday's people are dead. Not relevant - dead and gone. That party's over, move on. This is not healthy
Computing systems are built in layers. The text field that you used to write that comment has a rendering layer that was only universally present across devices and operating systems about 8 years ago.
We are now operating in an environment where the average programmer is writing using frameworks on top of frameworks, on top of libraries, on top of SDKs, on top of containers, on top of VMs, on top of OSs, on top of hypervisors, on top of kernels, on top of microcode, and that's collapsing a bunch of the layers.
To have any hope of explaining to the next generation how many of the truly beautiful and fun aspects of computing systems operate, you need to strip away many of these layers.
A great way to do that is with old systems where the layers didn't exist.
I relate with this sentiment.
Part of me is happy that my whole house is filled with solid wood furniture for cheep, but I'm deeply saddened by people's lack of value for real things as well as I fell alone in my system of values.
It feels like we're living in a Huxley dystopia sometimes.
And sometimes you are among the ones to whom it will have value, but realize that only too late. Before my first relocation in the late 90s to a much smaller house, I tossed a huge load of old electronics magazines dating from the 70s on, and deeply regretted that years later. As partial consolation, I later discovered most of those issues have been already scanned and sent for preservation to a local repository (0) of vintage technical magazines.
> A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone. That can be hard to accept, but it's true.
Sure, but this is some kind of "vintage computer fest", who are supposed to understand that old stuff has value, and who are entrusted with it, and not just given it to dispose of. The very word "vintage" in their name should mean something.
If you can't find it a home, as the donor intended, call that person to take it back.
If that person just wanted the stuff gone, they would not have organized it into bins, and would have driven to their closest paper recycling place.
These VCF people look like total dickheads here, any way you look at it.
Was that the origin of Google Books, lol. Presumably, you imaged and OCR-ed the material; did you classify it using USPC/CPC/ECLA? Was there a search service? Was it made available only in Patent Litigation, across the whole org, or to the public?
Any of those documents of 'old stuff' been used for observations to patent offices, or as citations in court - ie did it pay off?
I worked at UK Patent Office 20 odd years ago they had many small troves of journals, books, clippings that individual examiners had collected and classified (UKC, and ECLA). All gone I expect, replaced for patent search by 100s of millions more patent documents, journal articles, and everything on the web.
This is a TikTok generation answer (even if you are 70 years old) -- the thinking is: discard anything that is more than x years old. It's not useful.
But all these things are precious historical documents of the development of technology and of course ourselves. They are vitally important to keep.
Of course they aren't "useful" in the classic sense such as their original purpose -- but they are useful to remind us how things were and how far we've come and what kind of problems were solved in what way by our predecessors.
> But all these things are precious historical documents of the development of technology and of course ourselves. They are vitally important to keep.
No argument there. On the other hand, we cannot preserve every last item. Seeming as these were described as publications, there would have been multiple copies produced. Hopefully the VCF did their research prior to disposal to ensure multiple copies still exist (that are accessible to people, in better condition, and in their original form).
Jason Scott certainly has the right to be upset about what happened. It takes time to put together and maintain a collection. He entrusted that collection in the VCF's care. There is probably very good reason why he ought to be upset. Chances are that someone else entrusted those publications to his care. If that is the case, the VCF managed to violate the trust that someone else placed in Jason Scott, and not just Jason Scott's trust in the VCF.
That being said, humanity creates mountains of stuff. We cannot afford to keep every last example, or even every last example that collectors manage to get their hands on. For all of this talk about the current generation not valuing old things and older generations preserving things for generations, well, that never really happened. At least not in the way people are suggesting. In most cases, those old things were "preserved" because they were significantly cheaper to maintain than to replace. Even in the case of publications, one would find that most libraries ended up disposing of publications and only a handful specialized in archiving materials.
In the end, what we should be doing is looking towards the future while keeping an eye on the past. By only looking forward, we miss the richness of our past and any lessons it may have to offer. By only looking to the past, we embracing stagnation and placing improvements in the human condition at risk. While the latter may sound extreme, we only have so many resources (even in our age of plenty).
> But all these things are precious historical documents of the development of technology and of course ourselves. They are vitally important to keep.
Sure, but we can digitize them, offer them online, for free, for everyone, with OCR even with search features... There's no need to keep moldy originals anymore, unless they're "special" to someone (=someone wants to keep them).
Eg. there's a really nice collection of old yugoslav magazines and books online, that is fun to skm through while on the toilet or in bed (instead of reddit or youtube), but keping, preserving, dusting etc. all that paper would be a pain.
We can, but will we? And will we maintain those collections?
There is some resilience in having collections scattered here, there, and everywhere in addition to having a substantial chunk of history reliant on one charity that is constantly under threat due to copyright law.
History suggests that at some point the Internet Archive will be lost.
Additionally, a digital copy doesn't preserve the physical artifact. The ink, paper, and glue contains information about trade, printing technology, and perhaps the environment as well. We don't know what questions people will ask in the future.
Sure, shit will happen, but it's much easier to preserve digital media than it is for physical media, especially when shit happens. Disk space is cheaper and cheaper while physical space is getting more and more expensive for the most of us. Also, physical media can't be duplicated (noone will actually print out copies of those old magazines, and even if they did, it wouldn't be the same).
I know you lose the experience of paper, but that experience is limited to the few that have the actual copies. Digital is available to everyone. I see more issues with more modern media, where eg. videogames cannot be played at all anymore, due to always-online drm and requiring backend servers that the publishers are shutting down (so even pirate cracks cannot help). For comparison, you can fit the whole NES and SNES library on a usb stick with space left over.
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface card for a device obsolete around the time I was born, but I digress). Fortunately Jon Decuir, a former Atari engineer also on stage giving the talk gave a decent thoughtful answer quickly thereafter, but that was enough.
VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.
Yeah and being nostalgic around people who don't share it is difficult, since if you talk about it then they will find you insufferable.
Unrelated but I can remember when a friend of mine came back from a long, glamorous trip and suddenly stopped sharing in our usual moments of nostalgia. They acted like they were embarrassed. It sucked because it made me believe that they were ashamed of who they used to be, and I felt sorry for them. This person has since made great efforts to adopt a newer, more glamorous persona. I miss when they were genuine. I miss my friend.
I met with some old college friends and we were discussing some of our antics at the time. I sort of cringed when being reminded of the lame stuff I had been doing at that time. That was me then, and now I'm a different person. I don't think I'm not being genuine though.
Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire event by the conduct of a single speaker, but to each their own, and all that.
To answer your question, yes, people are still writing malware for old systems. They don't even have to be network connected: computer viruses can spread perfectly fine from other media as well. People still send each other floppies in the mail.
It's not as prevalent as on modern mainstream systems of course, but for example, a new Amiga virus started spreading a couple of years ago. The Jackal bootblock virus overwrites the bootblock on floppy disks, possibly rendering them unusable.
"Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire event by the conduct of a single speaker [..]"
The answer was extremely rude. Had they said, they got rid of the documents, because they'd valued them differently from Jason, that'd have been rude and disappointing, but maybe understandable to some degree.
At least these things happen. A former landlady of mine had donated a rare and precious motorcycle she inherited from her father to a local museum. When she coincidentally learned about 10 years later that the museum was about to sell it, she bought it back for a lot of money. Donations can sometimes turn out not the way we want.
In my opinion, saying they just kept the boxes was appalling and beyond disrespectful and I think Jason's reaction is understandable. Of course we've only heard one side...
With regard to the show, I didn’t want to pile on, but here we go:
There weren’t that many talks (the primary thing I was interested in), the trade show section was pretty small, and there wasn’t really much for newcomers to explain why this old hardware deserves preservation.
Vintage computer meetups, like vintage car meetups, are mostly chummy in-group gatherings for the already initiated. It's where geeks of a particular brand can talk shop. (I usually don't attend them and instead go to demo parties[1], which are in no way any less esoteric.)
> There wasn’t really much for newcomers to explain why this old hardware deserves preservation.
It does and doesn't - much like old cars, record players, fighter jets, trains, radios and phones. A handful can be kept around for posterity, as museum pieces. There's a point in not forgetting how they work, since most modern stuff is to a large extent refinements and complexity layered on top of previous knowledge.
But mostly, it's just a fringe hobby. Old computers deserve preservation because someone cares deeply about them and loves tinkering with them. Just like with old cars, record players, trains and radios.
I am formally apologizing for minimizing the question. It was not my intention to be derogatory.
But to formally address your question:
The same issues that affect any FujiNet device, are the exact same which affect any IoT device. The problem sets are one and the same, and are addressed by a combination of disciplined test driven development (which we are now doing), and auditing (which we need people to help with.), as well as leveraging fixes from the upstream vendor framework (ESP-IDF).
Since this issue is very close to your heart, would you like to help address this issue directly? All of the issues that the FujiNet team addresses are a direct result of champions who drive them forward.
Thank you for your time,
Thomas Cherryhomes, Firmware Engineer, The FujiNet Team.
The 8-bit era was an interesting time because DRAM memory had finally become cheap and there was no clear cut market leader that had a definite average over the others. This lead to a lot of interesting innovation in the market, some truly unique designs, companies who bet big, some won and some bet it all and lost. The software industry for micros was also just getting started.
There was this whole period where machines were getting small enough that an individual person might be able to afford a computer, and away from unit record systems that were basically glorified accounting machines that worked with punched cards and paper tape into things such as refreshable text and graphics displays, sound chips, etc.
Why preserve it? Well if you want to know where you are going it helps to know where you've been; and yes, there's a heavy dose of nostalgia there for those of us who grew up with these machines.
Have you never wondered what the GUI and mouse was like BEFORE Windows and Mac? You could actually try it on a Lisa or Xerox Star, an Amiga or Atari ST, or using GEOS on the C64..
Joe Decuir is the man - there are a number of really good presentations of his on youtube. And the parent is talking about Fujinet, which is all the rage:
I just watched the video from that presentation and it didn't sound like anything so egregious that it would make you want to never attend a similar event was said (we couldn't hear your actual question very well). I get that there's a little more to your decision than that, but still.
It is not possible to infect 8-bit computers from the 1970s and early 1980s with malware. The operating system is on a dedicated chip that would have to be physically replaced with a new chip that contains the crippled OS. This is in stark contrast to more modern computers where the OS can be modified by software (e.g. malware).
Is the question about infecting the 8-bit computers connected via the ESP32-based FujiNet device, or about infecting the FujiNet device itself?
As Cherryhomes himself points out, that device is VASTLY more capable than the vintage hardware/software to which it's connecting. A compromised FujiNet running in a trusted network would be a significant security issue.
He's intensely invested in it, and sometimes comes off frustrated at the lack of interest (based on what I see on mastodon, happen to share instances). The suggestion of malware was probably somewhat offensive as it is antithical to bringing disparate retro system users together.
Sorry that happened, but I think he is an unusual case. Hoping to provide some understanding for why it played out that way even though your question was reasonable.
I have various electronic/computer things that various people would silently scream if they knew I was tossing them. I'll probably make a nominal effort to find a home but just a nominal effort and I bet they'll end up in someone else's attic after they've played around for a day or so.
They seem to be ESP32 based wifi modems talking to 8-bit machines over a variety of interfaces. I don't think exploits compromising the 8-bit machines are a serious concern or even likely. Presumably the question was just being playful curious.
The IoT-style modems, maybe, but that wasn't what was asked. I'm not sure what the architecture is like for the network so I can't really say if there are security concerns there.
I'm the 'inventor' (seems a bit of a weird term) of the Spectranet, a similar device for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, although it's wired ethernet rather than wireless (when I designed the device, there weren't simple-to-interface devices like the ESP32 readily available, however, the Wiznet W5100 chip for wired ethernet was, and is a perfect match for an 8-bit system).
It would be possible to write malware for a Spectrum using this device but I don't think anyone ever has - needless to say, a Sinclair Spectrum isn't a secure computing platform. It would certainly be possible to write a worm.
Back when I was a teenager, we had an econet network of BBC Micros/BBC Masters and Acorn Archimedes at our school, and I did indeed try to write a worm for that platform (essentially, attaching itself to a user's !Boot script - essentially adding some 6502 code to the start of it to allow the program to spread itself to other !Boot scripts - the BBC micro allowed you to attach 'hooks' to its system calls, so as long as the user didn't overwrite the memory where your program was or do FX 200,2 followed by Ctrl-Break (a precaution I always took before logging on :-)) you could keep a small program memory resident. Especially in a Master 128.
I gave up because I realised the teacher who ran the computer lab had started taking quite a close interest in the code I was writing, and I wasn't entirely confident that he didn't know 6502 asm (one day I forgot to PROT my system, and I noticed a slow down while running the assembler, the slow down a sure sign someone was using VIEW to view my screen. So I ran PROT, which disabled that, and within 30 seconds the guy was in the room and looking over my shoulder! He knew that I knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew what was going on) Afraid of being caught and banned, I abandoned the project. (For the avoidance of doubt, the 'malware' in question was a bit like the idea of the Morris worm, simply to spread itself but with no payload).
However something similar could be done on other 8 bit systems. The "mal" part of the malware would be extremely limited - with such a small amount of RAM, no multitasking and no memory protection, anything you load into memory isn't going to last long once a user loads a real program.
The real target of any malware would be things like the TNFS (network filesystem) daemon, as to be able to run on vintage hardware it's got to be written in plain C and there could be bugs, and the filesystem protocol being very simple and unencrypted is not secure (nor is it designed to be, the preface on the README for tnfs does tell users they are mad if they try to store any data they want to keep private). The other target I guess in the case of ESP32 based devices is the ESP32 itself, but that's not really malware targeting the vintage system.
There are certain expectations if you brand yourself as preservation organization. At least shop around when you are going to destroy what appears to be significant collection. You should have some connections and channels for this.
This tells me that this organization is likely to toss just about anything straight to recycling. If someone at lead just doesn't care about it at the moment...
I can't imagine VCF wouldn't have done that - it's standard practice. But they've also not said their side of this (nor would I expect them to when they'd have been setting up for their yearly event yesterday).
I have friends who are close to the situation and the most I think I'm able to repeat (as it's public info) is that there were management changes between then and now. Based on that alone, and it's a volunteer organisation? Fair to say someone might have forgotten to write down "Don't dispose of these" or the label fell off.
At the end of the day though, it's a bunch of magazines which were already scanned at pretty high resolution. Even most libraries back in the day transferred periodicals onto Microfiche, because there just wasn't room to store the paper copies. I really don't get why there's so much hoo-hah over this.
Storing stuff takes space and effort. Cataloging even more so. Making it available to others is a jump in magnitude.
Eventually, it can become untenable.
Organizations like this tend to not lack donors. What they lack is the capacity to cope with donations. Time, labor, space, money are all finite, regardless of their mission.
Even the Salvation Army will refuse things like furniture. It’s not carte blanche. That said, I’ll donate even ratty clothing to the SA because I know they’re at the tail end of consumer product life, they inspect and sort all the incoming clothing, and their discards end up bundled for recycle or other purposes.
I donate to let them have first crack at it with their expertise rather than condemn it to a landfill directly. Give that old ‘92 Comdex t-shirt one last chance.
I don’t know anything in detail about VCF. I don’t know if the IEEE has archives of everything already.
I know there’s an effort to scan several hundred Computer Shopper magazines. I know there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of time setting up a system to scan a very large stack of DEC VAX microfiche.
I guess its a shame these magazines didn’t fall into the hands of someone with the zeal these other folks have for their projects.
I have also learned to not question the motives and projects of folks in the vintage computer scene. Not my time, not my project, who am I to judge.
It was with a bit of a heavy heart when my large collection of Dr. Dobbs magazines went into the recycling bin.
When I cleaned out my grandfather’s house, I came back with (among other things) several dozen Popular Mechanics magazines from the 40s. They were all 200+ pages. Talk about a snapshot of a different world. But after 10+ years sitting in a box in the garage, and a house move later, I kept three and the rest went into the blue bin.
Which brings me to my final point. If you have a collection, if you have any care about its disposition, you should do that yourself to other enthusiasts that may share your interests. Because your heirs, or the people task with cleaning up after your gone, will likely just put it in a large dumpster to be carted away.
But then, even if you do get it to others, it may well end up in landfill anyway.
Yeah. The reality is that your old computer gear, computer software, or magazines will probably just end up with someone else who is something of a packrat about such things. They'll get some momentary pleasure out of it, it will end up in an attic basement, and the cycle will continue.
By all means leave out a few things that have particular significance to you but, by and large, I've learned that less is generally more.
Getting rid of books is part of running a library, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is part of running a museum or similar organization. That said, there are so many collectors out there I feel it would be better to at least try to find a home, even if it means selling them. It's easy for me to say that because I don't have to actually do it.
> Getting rid of books is part of running a library
It depends on what kind of library we are talking about.
Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – they throw out books all the time. They have quite limited space, so they can't keep books which are no longer relevant to their target audience.
National libraries, research libraries of leading universities – many of them rarely or never throw books out. I remember, when I was a university student, finding IBM 1400 manuals sitting on the shelves in the stacks. They are probably still sitting there. I believe they turned their last 1400 off in the 1970s.
I remember borrowing a book, and according to the due date stamp inside its cover, the last person to borrow it before me, had done so 40 years prior. You could tell the books that hadn't been borrowed in a long time, because they still had punch cards in them, from back when the library had used punch cards to track book borrowing. If you actually borrowed such a book, they'd remove the punched card and discard it as part of the borrowing process. I bet if I went back today (20+ years later), there would still be books with punched cards in them.
There's difference between archive and a library. Also, why didn't they process in the first place then? And for it being "hard to pass over" - it wasn't hard for them to have him drive 70 miles and pack all on his budget??
I mean, OK, sure, but if you're the museum that discards this material as a matter of course, well, now you know why Jason Scott is going to spend the next several years shredding your reputation online, right? It's not the final battle between good and evil. He's clear up front what the issue is. You can care what he has to say or not.
The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
Honestly, if I trust someone, and they tell me something as ambiguous as “they told me they threw them out”, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt. That’s not a very complex story that someone can misremember.
The way negation is concealed in the middle of that title reminded me of Zizek philosophizing about subtleties of the negative: continue to no longer attend, coffee without milk vs coffee without cream, and so on, and so on.
We shouldn't throw away the physical paper copies just because something has been scanned. In any large collection of scanned documents, you are going to get scanning errors/etc – you can catch a lot of these with quality control, but some will always slip through the cracks. (And, volunteer efforts to scan old computer documentation often don't have the time and resources for the best quality control.) If the original paper copy is still in existence, someone can always go back and rescan it again later. If all the paper copies are gone, that is impossible.
Paper is in fact pretty durable. A lot of History came through millennial papers.
I’m not saying that computers manuals will for sure stand the test of time for a the thousand years to come, but as long as they are protected from fire, they are probably a more reliable storage than a digital scan which will need humans to backup them regularly if they want to survive their physical media.
Sure digital backups, especially of PDF files, are easy and cheap, but they require an active human effort to keep the system alive.
The maximum useful resolution you can really get out of offset-printed magazines is around 200dpi. Scanners have been able to do 400dpi for many years, and have been stuck at the 1200dpi plateau for about as long.
Sometimes you just don't need a better scan, because you're just doubling up on data you already have.
There are lots of other issues that can occur with scans beyond just the raw resolution: misaligned pages (part of the text accidentally cut off from the scan), accidentally skipped pages, colour illustrations scanned in black and white, etc.
With a sufficiently robust QA process, you may be able to catch most of these issues. However, you can never reduce the probability to zero, and people scanning old computer manuals don't always have the necessary resources to implement the most robust QA process.
There's also some types of papers and inks that don't scan well. Omni Magazine used metallic inks in some of their issues, as did many tech magazines of the period, probably because it looked futuristic. These don't scan well and even if the content of the page is preserved, the look isn't. At which point it becomes as question of how much of the value of storing artifacts of the past is in the presentation in addition to the content?
I'm not part of this scene and I'm not a collector, so I my dispassionate perspective is that at some point the cost of quality insurance is greater than the benefit. For a very important issue of a very important magazine, of course, keep it around. For a less important one, maybe retaining 95% of the data at 5% of the cost is good enough.
Whether something is a collectable depends on whether someone (ideally several someones) is willing to take it or pay for it ... apparently in this case, they weren't.
Comparing a periodical to a mint shrink-wrapped MTG card isn't really a fair comparison. Even back in the day, most libraries didn't keep periodicals, they were "scanned" (photographed) onto microfiche at the end of every year or two to save space. Some stuff just takes up too much space to store, or isn't practical to when the information is of limited value or already present in another form.
> I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before.
Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.
I dunno, the whole damn situation stinks, but it feels like there's a hell of a lot more going on here than just a box of magazines.
I don't really have the time to look into this more, it's not my group. My involvement was to reply as (I thought) a friend to ask both sides to chill and get around a table, and the outcome of that was that Jason opted to berate and belittle me. We'd worked together in the past (long time ago) on a preservation project and over time he's burned bridges with a lot of the people who worked on that.
I have no idea what's going on with Jason these days, but I hope he's okay.
> the outcome of that was that Jason opted to berate and belittle me.
If when communicating with him you trivialized the loss of a couple dozen large containers of historical IEEE-related documents that he saved, packed up and rented a truck to deliver as "just a box of magazines," I bet he did berate you.
Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. I offered to privately explain what really happened on Twitter (X) and was blocked as a result and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar. I only want to interject the facts as I know them and maybe offer up a couple of opinions.
When it was donated, the policy was take everything that anyone wanted to donate. So many people were thrilled to volunteer time to "rescue" just about anything, a laudable goal, and very few people volunteered to spend time to sort through the donations, even if only to make it fit in a finite space.
The structure at the time was a national (still unelected to this day) board and an executive director. My role, at the time of the donation, was as a volunteer who spent an insane amount of hours working in the warehouse to find ways to fit things and count things so that they could be put out for surplus sale. At one point, the warehouse contained over 60 Commodore 64 floppy drives. But this wasn't hoarding, this was being buried in unopened boxes and no one keeping track of what to keep and what to rehome or even what was in the warehouse.
Up until about 3 years ago, if you went to a VCFestival East and purchased "VCF Surplus", it was because I and one or two others spent countless hours trying to count what was in the warehouse. All of that money raised was earmarked to warehouse improvements, I might add. We opened hundreds of boxes to count equipment and try to sort what paper was and wasn't archived and even built a library that was intended to be moved to a climate controlled space (I believe it still has not been moved, but it is at least accessible as a library instead of hundreds of closed boxes of paper). Paper that was needed to be archived was archived. Paper that was considered important enough was added to the library. Paper that wasn't as important (like popular computer magazines) was offered over and over again to the membership. Almost everything found a good home. This, however, explains why the donation wasn't returned. It was parted out as part of a bigger solution and dealt with on a piece by piece basis. Having literally been there when the donation was made, it was clear that this was odds and ends that had long ago been checked for archiving. So this, if only in my opinion, was dumped on VCF as a convenient, free, storage opportunity. Does anyone really think it would have been donated to a warehouse without climate control by the ocean if there was any hint of archiving needed? By one of the most well known archive activists on the planet? Yet OP uses the implication that history has been lost to create unnecessary drama. No history has been lost and a lot of history has been saved. A lot of history is out in the world, even if maybe in private hands, instead of spoiling in a warehouse directly exposed to salt water air. And yes, climate control is being worked on, I hear donations are accepted, but do know that most of the stuff still in the warehouse was heading towards recycling or worse when it ended up in the warehouse.
The warehouse is now managed by an *elected* VCF Mid-Atlantic Steering Committee (something I originally proposed, co-wrote the bylaws, and was a founding member of). I don't know what they are and aren't doing now, but I do know none of them were involved with this mess. Taking the organization to task for a lack of institutional knowledge is fine, but ignoring primary facts stated by people who were there troubles me greatly. All the complaining blogs posts wont change the way the warehouse is run, but the membership is completely able to vote people in and out if they believe the warehouse is being mismanaged in any way. They are also always looking for new volunteers, if you are somewhat near Monmouth County New Jersey.
tl;dr: Nothing to see here. Just unnecessary drama.
I think the silliest part about this “saga” is that Jason is leading a one-man boycott at his own detriment. He’s depriving himself of a social community meeting place for his passion because his donation to the organization that facilitates those meetups wasn’t put to some kind of completely unspecified use.
> A number of years later, I contacted the Vintage Computer Federation to ask how the magazines were doing, if they were part of a project, or if I needed to transfer them elsewhere.
If you read between the lines on that quote, it’s clear that Jason doesn’t even know what someone is supposed to do with all this stuff, but he called up years later in hopes that someone else came up with an idea.
If he wants the materials to be part of a project, he should have spent the time needed to make them into a project. But really, Jason doesn’t know what to do with them, that’s why he donated them in the first place.
It’s not much different than dropping off an attic full of miscellaneous paintings to the Met and expecting them to put them in an exhibit.
If you want to make a qualified donation, make a qualified donation. Write up a contract that tells the organization what it’s allowed to do with your donation. Otherwise, anything is fair game.
This has to be one of the lamest, or if you prefer "silliest", possible responses.
>If he wants the materials to be part of a project, he should have spent the time needed to make them into a project. But really, Jason doesn’t know what to do with them, that’s why he donated them in the first place.
>It’s not much different than dropping off an attic full of miscellaneous paintings to the Met and expecting them to put them in an exhibit.
>If you want to make a qualified donation, make a qualified donation. Write up a contract that tells the organization what it’s allowed to do with your donation. Otherwise, anything is fair game.
First, as he wrote and of course you read, that is indeed a lesson he has taken:
>"Finally, this is all relatively minor in terms of the work I do and projects I focus on, an event that brought me some fury but which has mostly played the part of filed under “life lessons”. [...] My conversations with people and organizations I shift materials to are much longer, much more involved, and with much more contingencies as a result of this event, and things are better for it.
So apparently he's doing exactly as you say in response. He, rightly or wrongly, felt he'd trusted where he shouldn't have and will be more explicit about expectations going forward. That's good?
Second, trying to shift to legalism from a social complaint is crappy. He never said it wasn't "fair game" or that he'd be talking to his lawyer or any such thing. He never even implies there was a contract to the contrary, that didn't have every "right" in the legal sense to do whatever they wished. It was a terms-free donation. But just because the law lets you do something doesn't mean you're free of social reactions. If people feel you've treated them badly, even if it is totally allowed, they may exercise their freedom to tell others about it and refuse to associate with you further. Others may then react in turn, or not depending on how they judge the event. "You didn't have a contract so haha too bad for you" is not the greatest take in the world.
For such a "silly" response from me, it's interesting that the author is doing exactly what I said he should do, as you pointed out. Doesn't sound all that silly to me if we all agree on that point.
But also, it's a bit surprising to me that a professional archivist didn't think of this possibility way before this incident occured, considering that pretty much every philanthropist organization on the planet handles gifting with stipulations and guardrails as a very well-known practice.
> If people feel you've treated them badly, even if it is totally allowed, they may exercise their freedom to tell others about it and refuse to associate with you further.
Related to this quote, I emphasize how my comment is in the context of the perspective of someone on the side of the organization. That person believes there wasn't malice involved and had some points that I thought were well-reasoned.
I am similarly free to criticize that person who is telling others about their bad experience. I'm free to say "that guy on Yelp who is boycotting Taco Bell forever because one franchise location gave him stale cinnamon twists is wack."
From the outside looking in it looks kind of ridiculous. Like, here's a guy with a picture of a bunch of unmarked plastic bins in his back yard next to a bunch of other discarded items like a Chevy Blazer, used tire, and some kind of rusty metal barrel, so forgive me for questioning whether these bins contain anything of value. And then there's another picture of the still-unmarked bins in a dingy looking warehouse full of also-unmarked over-stacked cardboard boxes, and the guy leaving his stuff there acts shocked that a place that looks like that didn't do a good job with preservation.
If you didn't know Jared was a well-known archivist you'd probably assume this was another case of my Grandma asking me to go through her record collection or take her fine china because they're "valuable."
>Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. I offered to privately explain what really happened on Twitter (X) and was blocked as a result and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar. I only want to interject the facts as I know them and maybe offer up a couple of opinions.
>and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar
I have no specific knowledge here at all, but I am capable of reading and remembering events <1 day ago. And you were here, on HN, absolutely calling him a liar [0]:
>"I was actually there. Nothing in this blog post is factual."
>"so I'll correct myself say almost the entirety of the blog post is false."
You called him a liar and now are trying to pull some /woe is me people are twisting my words/? As the top reply you never responded to said, it's perfectly conceivable this was all a result of a very poor series of communications. But you've spent a lot of words over the last 24h to try to cast shade on a well known apparently dedicated archivist sharing a very simple, straight forward personal experience he felt was negative and calling him a liar without actually addressing the substance. You don't show the communications didn't happen. You make appeals to incredulity ("Does anyone really think it would have been donated to a warehouse without climate control by the ocean if there was any hint of archiving needed") when according to the blog ("To make this donation, I paid for the containers, filled them, put many issues in bags, and then rented a truck to drive them the roughly 70 miles to the VCF headquarters in Wall, NJ. There I dropped them off and went home. This was roughly 2017.") yeah it does sound like he was serious about archiving it, and it's not at all clear that it would have been clear to him that dropping it off at the HQ would mean it would permanently live forever in a non-cc warehouse next to the ocean.
The original blog was pretty measured and to the point. Just his feelings, his perspective, and why he was making a choice to people who follow him rather then leaving it quiet. He's clearly still quite upset but didn't say the whole org was trash or that nobody should ever go. It may have all been a bad misunderstanding and leadership screw up that has left some bad feelings which would be too bad but can't always be fixed except maybe by time. But man are you doing a shitty job of making your case.
No, I said the post was false. I never said that he was lying, but I will state for the record that he was given misinformation due to lack of institutional knowledge (I am no longer active in the institution for entirely other reasons) . I offered to privately fill him on the real story (at least as I knew it from first hand knowledge) and he chose to double down, so here we are.
I will also add, one last time, when he was dropping it off plenty of other people were dropping off at the same time. We did the best we could with the manpower we had, but nothing was thrown away and a everything was preserved to the best of our abilities. So the only sin we might be guilty of is not keeping paper in the tubs. I'm not sure what good paper in tubs does anyone, though. Libraries seem like a much better solution and we built one, as I already stated. Send some money to the VCFederation and they might help to climate control it. If you are local, volunteer.
tbh, the abhorrent behavior of VCF employees (and former employees), as well as some of the commenters on Mr. Scott's page, has proved his point in spades that VCF East is a disgusting organization.
Hilarious that the 1st person other-side account of this bizarre cry for attention from Scott is being down-voted here.
Scott may feel he needs some attention-- so dredging up something he already posted a few years ago is somehow a good faith folksy rumination that will help people? I wish him well if he believes that.
Other than folks generally lamenting the situation there are quite a few who seem to have their knickers in a twist.
There are a number of people who seem to need PR training, or basic human decency training in relation to this topic. The original post, and this one were very civl and dry (here's my story with plain delivery). The responses being so... charged is not not a good look. It makes the groups and people responding look, well, like assholes, to be blunt about it.
If your running a "vintage computer festival" you might want to change your name based on the behavior of other people speaking on behalf of their VCF...
exactly type of person to create them and then eventually despise them. One has to wonder if all of us are just cyclical creatures regardless and what really matters?
Years ago, I tried to retrieve a webpage link[1] that had an important article to encryption and the website had a redesign and all of their articles were removed.
I reached out to them later and asked if they had a copy of the article, or knew where I could get one, but they reported that they no longer have any of that. The same for a commercial that my father was in for a local mall, the mall was purchased by another company and lost ties with the media company that shot the commercial-- this media company is no longer around and thus no more archives.
Not necessarily and it depends a lot on what the materials were. IEEE publications were mentioned, it was founded in 1963 and there's a good chance that anything from the first 10 years may no longer be in archives unless donated back by a recipient.
I'd probably have more faith that IEEE publications still existed somewhere in some form. But the vast majority of publications either don't exist at all or they exist only in physical form someplace and aren't readily accessible.
This is a real storm in a hissy teacup stuff. One guy's coveted old computer magazines is another guy's paper recycling. Maybe the author should have first checked to see if these were any use better elsewhere.
I know nothing about this stuff and have never had the desire to "collect" anything. But it seems like part of the problem is that the author received these materials from other folks who trusted him to find a good home for them on. So he feels a sense of responsibility to the folks who gave him the stuff.
The author has racked up significant debt hoarding other archival materials over the years so yeah he's a little disappointed someone else just threw stuff he spent good money on saving
Did they ask for this donation? If not, they probably should have refused this at the start, instead of accepting it and then throwing away. But I don't think they did the wrong thing by throwing old magazines away - if this was the case, everyone would just dump all their old stuff on them, basically as if they were a garbage dump. Just because you think something is valuable it doesn't mean it is - to prove it, just try selling the stuff on ebay...
When you run a vintage computing festival, and accept historical material from one of the most prominent conservationists of computer artifacts alive, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing "old magazines" away.
These guys were not goodwill accepting random trinkets from random people. Jason Scott is basically saying "I discovered they are hacks, and I will not support hacks"
prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150