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.
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.