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I am no longer attending vintage computer festivals
- noobermin 2y agoNote that Vintage Computer Festivals refers to a specific festival held by the Vintage Computer Foundation (VCF). Jason isn't saying he will never go to any festival ever again.
- santoshalper 2y agoYes, in this case the capitalization is important.
- MaxBarraclough 2y agoIt's unclear even with title case, as the words would be capitalised anyway.
- amichlin 2y agoIt is so much more confusing than that. 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.
- 2four2 2y agoI'm getting a resource error when trying to access. Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Keyframe 2y agowayback machine mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240411180449/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 https://web.archive.org/web/20240411180449/http://ascii.text...
- lmorchard 2y agoThat happens on small web sites, sometimes. Maybe try again later, as advised?
- stronglikedan 2y agoI hope they at least recycled them.
- electricdreams 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- D13Fd 2y agoThat’s really a shame. He’s lucky they were at least honest enough to give a straight answer, I suppose.
- karmakaze 2y agoIt is a shame. The direct answer to me, only indicates how little concern is being shown to their subject matter.
- h2odragon 2y agoThe politics of volunteer organizations tends to get uglier after there gets to be money in it. Preservation of things like this, ephemeral history, is important. Everybody recognizes that immediately: "hey what a good idea if someone would save that stuff". The actual doing gets harder. i got a stack of 17 years of "PC magazine" somewhere; easy to find people who say "oo cool i'd love to look through those" but much harder to find anyone willing to come pick them up.
- init2null 2y agoI just found my two remaining beloved PCMags in my boxes. They have such fond memories attached, but I'm thrilled that I don't have 17 years. I understand the desire to keep years of magazines, but I'd worry that it becomes a personality trait at that point. And of course they take up way too much room. My newly-adopted Win98 PC is bad enough.
- nxobject 2y agoI'm sad there's no easily-available public resource that would at least destructively scan those for you.
- nanomonkey 2y ago
- WhitneyLand 2y agoIt sounds like Jason invested a lot of time and care in making a donation of a large collection of possibly historic periodicals. He disagreed with the way the donation was handled, they apparently tossed them without much consideration and kept his plastic bins. So, he’s decided no longer to attend festivals. Was the issue about disrespect, the loss of the periodicals, mismanagement, or a combination? It doesn’t say.
- noobermin 2y agoGiven Jason is in the business of archiving things, likely the loss itself is has to be a part of it.
- santoshalper 2y agoIt seems almost impossibly rude to take a donation like that, then to destroy it without even seeing if the person who donated it would like it back.
- nocoiner 2y agoAnd how did it even come up that they were enjoying their continued use of his plastic bins? Did they think that would be consolation?! I know this is only one side of the story, but based on his subjective experience here, I can’t say I blame the guy at all for feeling so insulted or being unwilling to accept an apology.
- WhitneyLand 2y agoI don’t get the downvotes for a recap, was something incorrect?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- navjack27 2y agoAll that history, gone. Screw em
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 2y agoSounds like the donation was unsolicited, Jason just expected the thousand pounds of tree pulp to be appreciated by a vintage computer festival?
- santoshalper 2y agoIt definitely does not sound like that. What a strange interpretation. Who would spend hundreds of dollars and hours of time just to do an unsolicited drop?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI'll take the L, without context and just reading the blog there wasn't any hint at coordination with the receiving party (besides the donation being accepted I suppose) Speaking from experience tho people clearing out storage containers sometimes do strange things
- wormius 2y agoJason is an (the?) official archivist of archive.org. He's not just some dude grabbing spare containers of junk and dumping them. He knows what he's doing. :) hopefully this puts him on your radar. He's the one who was behind the software archive of old DOS programs and getting them running in emulation in the browser. Dude is super cool (he can be a curmudgeon at times, but what he DOES is cool).
- elaus 2y agoI mean if the donation is unwanted, it is possible to deny it (you could even go the "we only want the containers" route). Or if the decision comes at a later point in time, one could ask the donor if he wants the stuff back (once again, possibly accompanied by "but we'd like to keep the containers").
- amatecha 2y agoThat's pure speculation. There's no reason to assume he randomly dropped off a ton of containers full of stuff without having prior communication/arrangement with them, or at the very least, an acknowledgement/acceptance of the material when he arrived.
- amatecha 2y agoJust a reminder that VCF's mission statement is literally "To preserve computing history through education, outreach, conservation, and restoration"[0]. It's pretty egregious that they would destroy such a large collection of material directly relevant to computing history. [0] https://vcfed.org/about/ https://vcfed.org/about/
- Lerc 2y agoI care about vintage computers and early computing history, because quite a few people I know are aware of this I am gifted old hardware and documentation. I have nowhere to set them up or display them so they go into storage. I would willingly gift them to good homes, I feel my role is as a custodian. I cannot make use of these things, but I can ensure that they continue to exist. I can completely sympathise with the anger that the author of this post feels. They were performing this custodial role and the expectation in passing to a new custodian is that they preserve the material or pass on to a new custodian. I'm sure if faced with the option of destruction or taking back the donation the author would have taken it back.
- wormius 2y agoJust a heads up - Jason Scott, the author is the "Free Range Archivist" and software curator for archive.org. (see his other site textfiles.com for another great historical archive of content - that goes way back as well) Can you imagine having been gifted this by one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) name online for archiving things and then just. Dumping it? No shit he's offended. Shame that orgs get screwed when quality members leave. They deserve to be called out for this publicly, and hopefully they learn their
- cranky908canuck 2y ago'Lerc' comment speaks to the key thing here: there was a miscommunication: Donor: I would like to charge you with care and control of this archival material. Recipient: Thank you for the containers and fuel. What happened then is in the past, no going back. The incident raises the bar for archive recipients ("is this an archive, what can we do with it"). Some archiving orgs now will not accept donations without a monetary donation to cover the archiving process. I have to say I agree with that, insofar as it filters out "I didn't discard it, I donated it to a museum".
- gn4d 2y agolol what? Why are you running cover for them? Do you work for VCF East?
- 2y ago
- prosaic-hacker 2y agoI have a storage room under the stairs which would be a vintage computer museum of its own. I am keeping it there until I downsize the house in the next 5 years. I have been delusionally waiting for that 10,000 year preservation origanization to come into existence but I am not holding my breath. If a billionaire funded museum could run into trouble (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880) what hope is there for anything else. PS. I have a cache of ~10,000 1980s and 90s DIP ICs (8032 Micro controllers and support chips) that I want to find a use for. You could contact me at my account name without the punctuation at gmail.
- eschaton 2y agoLCM's trouble was entirely caused by LCM not being completely spun off with an endowment prior to Paul Allen's untimely death and the inheritance of his estate by his sister Jody. Jody Allen doesn't care about LCM, so she "shut it down" rather than continue paying for it, but apparently she can't completely shut it down--probably due to how its structure was set up when founded, at least Paul got that right--otherwise I expect she would. In other words, the problem with LCM was pretty specific to the timing of Paul's death and the shiftiness of his sister, not anything to do with museums for this sort of thing as a class.
- strict9 2y ago>However, I was told, they had decided to keep the plastic boxes, and were making use of them. This is more of an insult than a consolation. I'm still in disbelief that they were tossed out rather than offered back or donated elsewhere.
- soraminazuki 2y agoLooking at the response from commenters who say they were affiliated with VCF and the amount of flagged comments here, I’m inclined to believe that it was indeed an insult.
- eschaton 2y agoLook which comments are being flagged and downvoted though. There's obviously some brigading happening by people who buy Jason Scott's story.
- da39a3ee 2y ago[flagged]
- nxobject 2y agoA sad lesson on the ethics and goals of vintage collecting: are you responsible for stewarding everything you have, to your best ability, for the next generation? I'm sure we all think the answer is yes – but when putting that in practice, as in this case, it's easy to (self-interestedly) not think of all of the consequences. The same applies to turning old Macs into aquariums, etc.
- amichlin 2y agoAs a former warehouse volunteer at VCF in Wall, NJ, I can attest that this blog post consists of only conjecture and no facts. 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.
- sshine 2y ago> Nothing in this blog post is factual. So VCF doesn’t have those plastic boxes any more?
- amichlin 2y agoI can't speak to that as I haven't been involved in two years. But they were there two years ago, so I'll correct myself say almost the entirety of the blog post is false.
- santoshalper 2y agoSo, the author did not donate magazines? The magazines were not disposed of? There were not many asserted facts in the post. Which exact ones were lies?
- soraminazuki 2y agoFYI GP is now claiming they never called the author a liar. > I offered to privately explain what really happened on Twitter (X) and was blocked as a result and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022739
- cjs 2y agoWhat does "checked for archiving" mean? Is this collection available to the public in any way?
- cranky908canuck 2y agoWith a large (at least in kilograms) collection of vinyl and shellac records, I have looked into the 'what happens next (ie., what should my executor do)' issue. The most memorable comment was in the blog of a buyer of collections. Can't find the link but paraphrased: "I will never even look at a collection that has had anyone else peruse and buy some discs. They bought your collection." As in, most 'collections' are really 'accumulations', the dealer will buy your accumulation and give you psychological cover that someone really values all of it, but keep the valuable stuff and bin the rest --- and first do an assay that there are indeed some gems in the ore. Also, "If you recognize the performers, it's not of any value". I see so many records at thrift shops that make me think "Crap, did I drop that off by mistake in my last move" that I have to concede that the fate of my collection will be the replacement of fossil fuels. As a classical listener and collector, I am nontheless moving to a (cynical?) assessment that a lot of those collections are "the music you were told you should enjoy". Yep, it's heartbreaking. This thread makes me think about what the real goal should be, given that the material media is merely fuel. Maybe a short document about the things that I want to charge the beneficiaries with giving a listen to?
- woleium 2y agowhat is it you are trying to leave behind that could not be more portably replicated by a collection of flac files? Personally ill be happy if my children would listen to some of the music i like and remember me. my collection will not mean anything to them, nor should it.
- cranky908canuck 2y agoYou are correct! Not a technology, I'd just give them a list (eg. Shostakovich Piano Cto 2), maybe in the when 'when you read this I am gone' letter, though I would like to make it happen before then, so we can talk! ... and yes, that means do some work now. also consider (Grand)^n(children) Ideas about how to leave a 'repertoire legacy' would merit a new thread!
- ehPReth 2y agoMaybe consider the Internet archive? https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-internet-archive/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
- unixhero 2y ago[flagged]