18 ms·

I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

195 points by ehPReth 2y ago

ehPReth 2y ago
submission is a follow-up to this original post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  Mirror. https://web.archive.org/web/20240413015819/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 https://web.archive.org/web/20240413015819/http://ascii.text...
AlbertCory 2y ago
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.
- chris_wot 2y ago
  So why did they take the material? If you don’t want it, then don’t take it.
  - underlogic 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - zx8080 2y ago
      > 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. /s
      - underlogic 2y ago
        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
        AllegedAlec 2y ago
        Gross computer nerds refuse to learn from the past and keep reinventing the triangular wheel every 20 minutes. More news at eleven.
        jumelles 2y ago
        I'm infinitely thankful most people don't think like this. History is a treasure.
        pushedx 2y ago
        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.
        indymike 2y ago
        > No this group wastes so much time trying to relive the 70's and 80's they're missing an even greater paradigm shift "<Sigh>if you only knew." - Guy who did his capstone project on neural networks and computer vision in the 80s.
        philipswood 2y ago
        To understand fully where the encoding of the text your comment is written in comes from requires you to go all the way back to the telegraph line... If you use a CLI - you need to go back to at least teletypes. Not everyone needs to be concerned with this, but the historical examples of cultures that have throw away their history don't look too encouraging.
    - pushedx 2y ago
      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.
      - pinusc 2y ago
        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.
    - coobird 2y ago
      > 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.
      - pushedx 2y ago
        Right, Neural Networks were considered simply an academic curiousity for about 65 years. Disregarding the past is simply ignorance.
      - AlbertCory 2y ago
        > a thread about prior art 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.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        An old email I had once saved me from an expensive lawsuit.
      - Sakos 2y ago
        > what is this obsession with the past 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.
    - vsgherzi 2y ago
      This couldn’t be more wrong the past is extremely important especially in the age of abstraction
    - indymike 2y ago
      > Again however, that misses the point. What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? Those who ignore the past waste a lot of time re-inventing the already invented.
    - coldtea 2y 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.
    - icehawk 2y ago
      > Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday One doesn't have a tomorrow without a yesterday.
    - theodric 2y ago
      > 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?
    - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
      > 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.
      - f1shy 2y ago
        If not undoing mistakes from the 90’s…
  - zx8080 2y ago
    Donation sometimes helps to write off some budget. Speaking generally, not accusing anyone in this case, of course.
  - shusaku 2y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      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.
- somnic 2y ago
  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.
  - toast0 2y ago
    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.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    This. 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.
- knighthack 2y ago
  There's an Art of Manliness podcast that talks about this: https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/declutter-downsize-podcast/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/declu... 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.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    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.
    - cancerhacker 2y ago
      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.
    - fencepost 2y ago
      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.
    - 2y ago
- imgabe 2y ago
  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.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    I know people who've found this out the hard way, and I have, too: If you offer it for free, someone will take it. But asking ANY money is agreeing to wait a long, long time.
    - imgabe 2y ago
      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.
      - zimpenfish 2y ago
        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.
        ghaff 2y ago
        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.
        varjag 2y ago
- accrual 2y ago
  > 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. :)
  - wmf 2y ago
    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.
    - germinator 2y ago
      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.
      - telmnstr 2y ago
        Also a question of how long stuff will really stay around on the internet.
        philpem 2y ago
        Depends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        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.
- ip26 2y ago
  It’s a new phenomenon that culture is still absorbing, a result of abundance and progress. Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.
  - postmodest 2y ago
    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.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      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.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      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.
- tptacek 2y ago
  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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rig666 2y ago
  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.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > 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.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> 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-.
    - 2y ago
- kazinator 2y ago
  > 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.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  > A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone. 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 http://www.introni.it/riviste.html Mostly in Italian, a few in English, French and Spanish language.
- chefandy 2y ago
  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.
- lostemptations5 2y ago
  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.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    > 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.
    - jrumbut 2y ago
      > we can digitize them 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.
      - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
        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.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  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.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  > Even old wood furniture -- no one wants it. Old PC or Byte Magazines? Forget it; they're all over. It's always been like that unfortunately, but wait just a couple of centuries, and it will become valuable ;)
- danielfoster 2y ago
  Not only this, but accepting a donation is not an obligation to preserve something for an endless period of time.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Aeolun 2y ago
Why would you take all this stuff only to toss it all out? 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?
- tdeck 2y ago
  Getting rid of books is part of running a library, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is part of running a museum or similar organization. That said, there are so many collectors out there I feel it would be better to at least try to find a home, even if it means selling them. It's easy for me to say that because I don't have to actually do it.
  - rnewme 2y ago
    There's difference between archive and a library. Also, why didn't they process in the first place then? And for it being "hard to pass over" - it wasn't hard for them to have him drive 70 miles and pack all on his budget??
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I mean, OK, sure, but if you're the museum that discards this material as a matter of course, well, now you know why Jason Scott is going to spend the next several years shredding your reputation online, right? It's not the final battle between good and evil. He's clear up front what the issue is. You can care what he has to say or not. The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
    - eschaton 2y ago
      And you can also care whether what he says is actually accurate.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        Honestly, if I trust someone, and they tell me something as ambiguous as “they told me they threw them out”, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt. That’s not a very complex story that someone can misremember.
cwyers 2y ago
Hug-of-death happened and there's only three comments
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
drewzero1 2y ago
Resource limit reached; archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240413001045/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5591 https://web.archive.org/web/20240413001045/http://ascii.text...
- ssernikk 2y ago
  Thank you
codefeenix 2y ago
this dude used all the vintage parts to run a Beowulf cluster of 8086's to host this site.
- textfiles 2y ago
  ice burn
shrubble 2y ago
The real question is whether these journals were already scanned and archived or not.
- skissane 2y ago
  We shouldn't throw away the physical paper copies just because something has been scanned. In any large collection of scanned documents, you are going to get scanning errors/etc – you can catch a lot of these with quality control, but some will always slip through the cracks. (And, volunteer efforts to scan old computer documentation often don't have the time and resources for the best quality control.) If the original paper copy is still in existence, someone can always go back and rescan it again later. If all the paper copies are gone, that is impossible.
  - telmnstr 2y ago
    For many people there is a cost associated to storing items, be it old furniture or paperwork.
  - cortesoft 2y ago
    Where are you going to store the paper? And keep it from degrading?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - skissane 2y ago
      Obviously I'm describing the ideal situation, and sometimes practical realities mean we have to compromise on the ideal. Still, as much as is practical, we should try to avoid throwing physical documents out even if we know they have been scanned.
    - pjerem 2y ago
      Paper is in fact pretty durable. A lot of History came through millennial papers. 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.
wolpoli 2y ago
> I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before. Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.
- philpem 2y ago
  If they're still useful, why throw them away?
  - philpem 2y ago
    To clarify, I'm talking about the boxes. As in why throw good boxes away. Actionpackers are tough little brutes, and much sturdier than cardboard.
- philpem 2y ago
  I had no idea who this guy was but did a web search to fill myself in and all this turned up ... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-December/016950.html 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-December/016948.html https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-December/016943.html 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.
  - justin66 2y ago
zer00eyz 2y ago
Other than folks generally lamenting the situation there are quite a few who seem to have their knickers in a twist. 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...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
joshthecynic 2y ago
[dead]
pureheartlover 2y ago
Wouldn't the authors or publishers have the original copies somewhere?
- jacobolus 2y ago
  In many cases the original publishers are defunct or have eliminated their physical archives.
- ajdude 2y ago
  Years ago, I tried to retrieve a webpage link[1] that had an important article to encryption and the website had a redesign and all of their articles were removed. 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-cipher-rijndael/ https://www.100tb.com/blog/security-performance-serpent-ciph...
- fencepost 2y ago
  Not necessarily and it depends a lot on what the materials were. IEEE publications were mentioned, it was founded in 1963 and there's a good chance that anything from the first 10 years may no longer be in archives unless donated back by a recipient.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I'd probably have more faith that IEEE publications still existed somewhere in some form. But the vast majority of publications either don't exist at all or they exist only in physical form someplace and aren't readily accessible.
Ekaros 2y ago
There are certain expectations if you brand yourself as preservation organization. At least shop around when you are going to destroy what appears to be significant collection. You should have some connections and channels for this. 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...
- philpem 2y ago
  I can't imagine VCF wouldn't have done that - it's standard practice. But they've also not said their side of this (nor would I expect them to when they'd have been setting up for their yearly event yesterday). 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.
fiforpg 2y ago
The way negation is concealed in the middle of that title reminded me of Zizek philosophizing about subtleties of the negative: continue to no longer attend, coffee without milk vs coffee without cream, and so on, and so on. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY
sfmike 2y ago
exactly type of person to create them and then eventually despise them. One has to wonder if all of us are just cyclical creatures regardless and what really matters?
throwaway5959 2y ago
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface card for a device obsolete around the time I was born, but I digress). Fortunately Jon Decuir, a former Atari engineer also on stage giving the talk gave a decent thoughtful answer quickly thereafter, but that was enough. VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.
- tschak 2y ago
  As the speaker in question here, I wish to reply. 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.
- sellam 2y ago
  [flagged]
- sellam 2y ago
  [flagged]
- spectrumero 2y ago
  I'm the 'inventor' (seems a bit of a weird term) of the Spectranet, a similar device for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, although it's wired ethernet rather than wireless (when I designed the device, there weren't simple-to-interface devices like the ESP32 readily available, however, the Wiznet W5100 chip for wired ethernet was, and is a perfect match for an 8-bit system). 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.
haspok 2y ago
Did they ask for this donation? If not, they probably should have refused this at the start, instead of accepting it and then throwing away. But I don't think they did the wrong thing by throwing old magazines away - if this was the case, everyone would just dump all their old stuff on them, basically as if they were a garbage dump. Just because you think something is valuable it doesn't mean it is - to prove it, just try selling the stuff on ebay...
- glimshe 2y ago
  When you run a vintage computing festival, and accept historical material from one of the most prominent conservationists of computer artifacts alive, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing "old magazines" away. 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"
  - amichlin 2y ago
    Except nothing was thrown away.
    - justin66 2y ago
      Well, that's just like problem solved right there.
nottorp 2y ago
So Vintage Computer Festivals is an organization, not a generic term? People not into it might get confused...
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
This is a real storm in a hissy teacup stuff. One guy's coveted old computer magazines is another guy's paper recycling. Maybe the author should have first checked to see if these were any use better elsewhere.
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  I know nothing about this stuff and have never had the desire to "collect" anything. But it seems like part of the problem is that the author received these materials from other folks who trusted him to find a good home for them on. So he feels a sense of responsibility to the folks who gave him the stuff.
  - CYR1X 2y ago
    The author has racked up significant debt hoarding other archival materials over the years so yeah he's a little disappointed someone else just threw stuff he spent good money on saving
  - Simon_ORourke 2y ago
    > who trusted him to find a good home for them on. Guess he messed them around on that one so.
lupire 2y ago
Important! Title is wrong and misleading! Vintage Computer Festival should be capitalized. It is a specific organization he had a bad experience with.
amichlin 2y ago
Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. 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. I only want to interject the facts as I know them and maybe offer up a couple of opinions. 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
da39a3ee 2y ago
This is literally the least interesting thread I have ever seen on HN. Man complains about other people doing thing related to his hobby.
textfiles 2y ago
Hi, Jason Scott here. Just stopping in to say I'm surprised how much of this thread is about wood furniture.
- justin66 2y ago
  If a few people have learned that you've got to be careful keeping wood furniture around salt water, this thread will not have been in vain.
FerretFred 2y ago
"Death by Cow" ... be careful! https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/killer-cows-named-uks-most-30956262 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/killer-cows-named-uks-...
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />" Wondering if "ASCII by Jason Scott" is only ASCII, and if so, then is the charset=UTF-8 needed.

195 points by ehPReth 2y ago

submission is a follow-up to this original post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150

LeoPanthera 2y ago
Mirror. https://web.archive.org/web/20240413015819/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587 https://web.archive.org/web/20240413015819/http://ascii.text...

AlbertCory 2y ago

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.

chris_wot 2y ago
So why did they take the material? If you don’t want it, then don’t take it.
- underlogic 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - zx8080 2y ago
    > 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. /s
    - underlogic 2y ago
      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
      - AllegedAlec 2y ago
        Gross computer nerds refuse to learn from the past and keep reinventing the triangular wheel every 20 minutes. More news at eleven.
      - jumelles 2y ago
        I'm infinitely thankful most people don't think like this. History is a treasure.
      - pushedx 2y ago
        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.
      - indymike 2y ago
        > No this group wastes so much time trying to relive the 70's and 80's they're missing an even greater paradigm shift "<Sigh>if you only knew." - Guy who did his capstone project on neural networks and computer vision in the 80s.
      - philipswood 2y ago
        To understand fully where the encoding of the text your comment is written in comes from requires you to go all the way back to the telegraph line... If you use a CLI - you need to go back to at least teletypes. Not everyone needs to be concerned with this, but the historical examples of cultures that have throw away their history don't look too encouraging.
  - pushedx 2y ago
    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.
    - pinusc 2y ago
      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.
  - coobird 2y ago
    > 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.
    - pushedx 2y ago
      Right, Neural Networks were considered simply an academic curiousity for about 65 years. Disregarding the past is simply ignorance.
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      > a thread about prior art 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.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        An old email I had once saved me from an expensive lawsuit.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      > what is this obsession with the past 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.
  - vsgherzi 2y ago
    This couldn’t be more wrong the past is extremely important especially in the age of abstraction
  - indymike 2y ago
    > Again however, that misses the point. What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? Those who ignore the past waste a lot of time re-inventing the already invented.
  - coldtea 2y 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.
  - icehawk 2y ago
    > Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday One doesn't have a tomorrow without a yesterday.
  - theodric 2y ago
    > 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?
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    > 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.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      If not undoing mistakes from the 90’s…
- zx8080 2y ago
  Donation sometimes helps to write off some budget. Speaking generally, not accusing anyone in this case, of course.
- shusaku 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    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.
somnic 2y ago
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.
- toast0 2y ago
  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.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  This. 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.
knighthack 2y ago
There's an Art of Manliness podcast that talks about this: https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/declutter-downsize-podcast/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/declu... 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.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  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.
  - cancerhacker 2y ago
    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.
  - fencepost 2y ago
    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.
  - 2y ago
imgabe 2y ago
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.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  I know people who've found this out the hard way, and I have, too: If you offer it for free, someone will take it. But asking ANY money is agreeing to wait a long, long time.
  - imgabe 2y ago
    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.
    - zimpenfish 2y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        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.
      - varjag 2y ago
accrual 2y ago
> 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. :)
- wmf 2y ago
  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.
  - germinator 2y ago
    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.
    - telmnstr 2y ago
      Also a question of how long stuff will really stay around on the internet.
      - philpem 2y ago
        Depends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      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.
ip26 2y ago
It’s a new phenomenon that culture is still absorbing, a result of abundance and progress. Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.
- postmodest 2y ago
  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.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    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.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    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.
tptacek 2y ago
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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rig666 2y ago
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.
rdtsc 2y ago
> 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.
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> 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-.
  - 2y ago
kazinator 2y ago
> 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.
squarefoot 2y ago
> A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone. 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 http://www.introni.it/riviste.html Mostly in Italian, a few in English, French and Spanish language.
chefandy 2y ago
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.
lostemptations5 2y ago
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.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  > 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.
  - jrumbut 2y ago
    > we can digitize them 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.
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      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.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
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.
flohofwoe 2y ago
> Even old wood furniture -- no one wants it. Old PC or Byte Magazines? Forget it; they're all over. It's always been like that unfortunately, but wait just a couple of centuries, and it will become valuable ;)
danielfoster 2y ago
Not only this, but accepting a donation is not an obligation to preserve something for an endless period of time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

Aeolun 2y ago

Why would you take all this stuff only to toss it all out? 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?

tdeck 2y ago
Getting rid of books is part of running a library, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is part of running a museum or similar organization. That said, there are so many collectors out there I feel it would be better to at least try to find a home, even if it means selling them. It's easy for me to say that because I don't have to actually do it.
- rnewme 2y ago
  There's difference between archive and a library. Also, why didn't they process in the first place then? And for it being "hard to pass over" - it wasn't hard for them to have him drive 70 miles and pack all on his budget??
- tptacek 2y ago
  I mean, OK, sure, but if you're the museum that discards this material as a matter of course, well, now you know why Jason Scott is going to spend the next several years shredding your reputation online, right? It's not the final battle between good and evil. He's clear up front what the issue is. You can care what he has to say or not. The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
  - eschaton 2y ago
    And you can also care whether what he says is actually accurate.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      Honestly, if I trust someone, and they tell me something as ambiguous as “they told me they threw them out”, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt. That’s not a very complex story that someone can misremember.

cwyers 2y ago

Hug-of-death happened and there's only three comments

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

drewzero1 2y ago

Resource limit reached; archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240413001045/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5591 https://web.archive.org/web/20240413001045/http://ascii.text...

ssernikk 2y ago
Thank you

codefeenix 2y ago

this dude used all the vintage parts to run a Beowulf cluster of 8086's to host this site.

textfiles 2y ago
ice burn

shrubble 2y ago

The real question is whether these journals were already scanned and archived or not.

skissane 2y ago
We shouldn't throw away the physical paper copies just because something has been scanned. In any large collection of scanned documents, you are going to get scanning errors/etc – you can catch a lot of these with quality control, but some will always slip through the cracks. (And, volunteer efforts to scan old computer documentation often don't have the time and resources for the best quality control.) If the original paper copy is still in existence, someone can always go back and rescan it again later. If all the paper copies are gone, that is impossible.
- telmnstr 2y ago
  For many people there is a cost associated to storing items, be it old furniture or paperwork.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  Where are you going to store the paper? And keep it from degrading?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - skissane 2y ago
    Obviously I'm describing the ideal situation, and sometimes practical realities mean we have to compromise on the ideal. Still, as much as is practical, we should try to avoid throwing physical documents out even if we know they have been scanned.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    Paper is in fact pretty durable. A lot of History came through millennial papers. 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.

wolpoli 2y ago

> I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before. Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.

philpem 2y ago
If they're still useful, why throw them away?
- philpem 2y ago
  To clarify, I'm talking about the boxes. As in why throw good boxes away. Actionpackers are tough little brutes, and much sturdier than cardboard.
philpem 2y ago
I had no idea who this guy was but did a web search to fill myself in and all this turned up ... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-December/016950.html 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-December/016948.html https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-December/016943.html 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.
- justin66 2y ago

zer00eyz 2y ago

Other than folks generally lamenting the situation there are quite a few who seem to have their knickers in a twist. 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...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

joshthecynic 2y ago

[dead]

pureheartlover 2y ago

Wouldn't the authors or publishers have the original copies somewhere?

jacobolus 2y ago
In many cases the original publishers are defunct or have eliminated their physical archives.
ajdude 2y ago
Years ago, I tried to retrieve a webpage link[1] that had an important article to encryption and the website had a redesign and all of their articles were removed. 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-cipher-rijndael/ https://www.100tb.com/blog/security-performance-serpent-ciph...
fencepost 2y ago
Not necessarily and it depends a lot on what the materials were. IEEE publications were mentioned, it was founded in 1963 and there's a good chance that anything from the first 10 years may no longer be in archives unless donated back by a recipient.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I'd probably have more faith that IEEE publications still existed somewhere in some form. But the vast majority of publications either don't exist at all or they exist only in physical form someplace and aren't readily accessible.

Ekaros 2y ago

There are certain expectations if you brand yourself as preservation organization. At least shop around when you are going to destroy what appears to be significant collection. You should have some connections and channels for this. 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...

philpem 2y ago
I can't imagine VCF wouldn't have done that - it's standard practice. But they've also not said their side of this (nor would I expect them to when they'd have been setting up for their yearly event yesterday). 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.

fiforpg 2y ago

The way negation is concealed in the middle of that title reminded me of Zizek philosophizing about subtleties of the negative: continue to no longer attend, coffee without milk vs coffee without cream, and so on, and so on. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY

sfmike 2y ago

exactly type of person to create them and then eventually despise them. One has to wonder if all of us are just cyclical creatures regardless and what really matters?

throwaway5959 2y ago

I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface card for a device obsolete around the time I was born, but I digress). Fortunately Jon Decuir, a former Atari engineer also on stage giving the talk gave a decent thoughtful answer quickly thereafter, but that was enough. VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.

tschak 2y ago
As the speaker in question here, I wish to reply. 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.
sellam 2y ago
[flagged]
sellam 2y ago
[flagged]
spectrumero 2y ago
I'm the 'inventor' (seems a bit of a weird term) of the Spectranet, a similar device for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, although it's wired ethernet rather than wireless (when I designed the device, there weren't simple-to-interface devices like the ESP32 readily available, however, the Wiznet W5100 chip for wired ethernet was, and is a perfect match for an 8-bit system). 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.

haspok 2y ago

Did they ask for this donation? If not, they probably should have refused this at the start, instead of accepting it and then throwing away. But I don't think they did the wrong thing by throwing old magazines away - if this was the case, everyone would just dump all their old stuff on them, basically as if they were a garbage dump. Just because you think something is valuable it doesn't mean it is - to prove it, just try selling the stuff on ebay...

glimshe 2y ago
When you run a vintage computing festival, and accept historical material from one of the most prominent conservationists of computer artifacts alive, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing "old magazines" away. 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"
- amichlin 2y ago
  Except nothing was thrown away.
  - justin66 2y ago
    Well, that's just like problem solved right there.

nottorp 2y ago

So Vintage Computer Festivals is an organization, not a generic term? People not into it might get confused...

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

This is a real storm in a hissy teacup stuff. One guy's coveted old computer magazines is another guy's paper recycling. Maybe the author should have first checked to see if these were any use better elsewhere.

jimmydddd 2y ago
I know nothing about this stuff and have never had the desire to "collect" anything. But it seems like part of the problem is that the author received these materials from other folks who trusted him to find a good home for them on. So he feels a sense of responsibility to the folks who gave him the stuff.
- CYR1X 2y ago
  The author has racked up significant debt hoarding other archival materials over the years so yeah he's a little disappointed someone else just threw stuff he spent good money on saving
- Simon_ORourke 2y ago
  > who trusted him to find a good home for them on. Guess he messed them around on that one so.

lupire 2y ago

Important! Title is wrong and misleading! Vintage Computer Festival should be capitalized. It is a specific organization he had a bad experience with.

amichlin 2y ago

Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. 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. I only want to interject the facts as I know them and maybe offer up a couple of opinions. 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

da39a3ee 2y ago

This is literally the least interesting thread I have ever seen on HN. Man complains about other people doing thing related to his hobby.

textfiles 2y ago

Hi, Jason Scott here. Just stopping in to say I'm surprised how much of this thread is about wood furniture.

justin66 2y ago
If a few people have learned that you've got to be careful keeping wood furniture around salt water, this thread will not have been in vain.

FerretFred 2y ago

"Death by Cow" ... be careful! https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/killer-cows-named-uks-most-30956262 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/killer-cows-named-uks-...

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />" Wondering if "ASCII by Jason Scott" is only ASCII, and if so, then is the charset=UTF-8 needed.