> 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.
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. :)