As best as I can tell, they just return false, as in you aren't running on those processors. m68 returns true. All just hardcoded scripts, though, nothing fancy.
94 karma · joined October 2, 2020
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.
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.
VCF = Vintage Computer Federation, a national non-profit
VCF also = Vintage Computer Festival
VCFestival East and West are run by VCFederation. VCFestival MidWest is not.
Vintage Computer Festival as a name has a complicated history, but the short version is anyone can use the term and does use the term.
VCFederation also manages the warehouse and museum space in Wall, NJ. The blog author has an issue with VCFederation, not all VCFestivals.
It just took up space that was ultimately used to save more important items, like actual computers, and was in a venue that was absolutely hostile to paper. So the paper found better homes. The statement that it was thrown away is factually incorrect. The implication that somehow history was lost is also incorrect.
But they were there two years ago, so I'll correct myself say almost the entirety of the blog post is false.
Everything was checked for archiving. Everything was offered to anyone who would listen for over a year. Most of the paper found a good home. In fact, a better home as the warehouse is near the ocean and has no climate control. Not a good place to donate paper. It should never have been donated and should never have been accepted (under previous management).
I was actually there. Nothing in this blog post is factual.