I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals
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prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150
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.
But there's lots of ways that information may not filter to the big pile of old magazines disintegrating in the salt air.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Hold your horses. You need that one for abusive usecases. My favourite flathead is both bent and chipped.
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.
I got like 12 old worn out tshirts I save since I want to use them for painting. But I never actually use them when I paint ...
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.
If you offer it for free, someone will take it. But asking ANY money is agreeing to wait a long, long time.
Ask at least a token amount and you will get someone who seriously wants it.
Relisted it for $20 and the next week it went painlessly.
If it's free, people assume it's not worth much (perhaps defective, etc).
If you ask a token amount, more people respond.
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. :)
And they had columnists and journalists and everything. Heady time.
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.
If you have something obscure, there's a good chance it hasn't.
I have friends who are Serbian living elsewhere and are about to start a family
They have no Serbian children’s media afaik (and it’s not exactly easy to find)
I found ~200GB of Serbian dubbed children’s media someone painstakingly digitised on /t/
I’m keeping it for when they eventually have those kids
Unless shown otherwise, assume nothing is archived correctly, completely or at all
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.
Eventually, I swear!
When searching for a bed to buy (as I wanted solid wood), I even found many stores specializing in solid wood furniture.
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.
[0]: https://www.otto.de/p/gozos-esstisch-scots-pine-series-essti...
(You did make your point though. I just really vehemently dislike pine as a building material for furniture)
No, it’s just become very expensive.
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.
I don’t know for other countries though.
But someone has to do it if it hasn't already been done. And that costs money/time.
Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-.
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.
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.
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.
(0) http://www.introni.it/riviste.html Mostly in Italian, a few in English, French and Spanish language.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It's always been like that unfortunately, but wait just a couple of centuries, and it will become valuable ;)
VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.
Most of these festivals are more about shared nostalgia than objective appreciation of technology from a specific time.
Like watching one of those videos from LGR. Watching him power up an old computer and hearing that "thunk" sound is beautiful.
And slighty offtopic, but I think nostalgia is fun when shared with people. Being nostalgic alone is a mix of warm and sad.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
It's too bad Cherryhomes shot down an interesting question.
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.
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 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.
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 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..
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 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.
Though to he fair, it seems the person that took it was pushed out and replaced?
In which case, why, if you do not take this stuff, would you work for a VCF?
The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
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.
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.
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.
Vintage Computer Festival should be capitalized.
It is a specific organization he had a bad experience with.
Still, as much as is practical, we should try to avoid throwing physical documents out even if we know they have been scanned.
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.
Sometimes you just don't need a better scan, because you're just doubling up on data you already have.
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.
Meanwhile, mint-condition, shrink-wrapped Magic the Gathering cards sell for $$$. Same goes for other collectibles and real art.
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.
People not into it might get confused...
Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.
https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...
Allegedly he'd quit three times in one year: https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...
https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...
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.
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.
Wondering if "ASCII by Jason Scott" is only ASCII, and if so, then is the charset=UTF-8 needed.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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."
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.
Kids: Pay your Taxes!
>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.
----
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.
but also
> Nothing in this blog post is factual.
Interesting take....
That's good to hear. So where might we find the archived versions of that materials in that donation?
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...
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.
[1] it would be nice if anyone could recover this text https://www.100tb.com/blog/security-performance-serpent-ciph...
Guess he messed them around on that one so.
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"