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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 co

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 3y ago
So why did they take the material? If you don’t want it, then don’t take it.
- underlogic 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zx8080 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
        Gross computer nerds refuse to learn from the past and keep reinventing the triangular wheel every 20 minutes. More news at eleven.
      - jumelles 3y ago
        I'm infinitely thankful most people don't think like this. History is a treasure.
      - pushedx 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
      Right, Neural Networks were considered simply an academic curiousity for about 65 years. Disregarding the past is simply ignorance.
    - AlbertCory 3y 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 3y ago
        An old email I had once saved me from an expensive lawsuit.
    - Sakos 3y 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 3y ago
    This couldn’t be more wrong the past is extremely important especially in the age of abstraction
  - indymike 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    > Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday One doesn't have a tomorrow without a yesterday.
  - theodric 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
      If not undoing mistakes from the 90’s…
- zx8080 3y ago
  Donation sometimes helps to write off some budget. Speaking generally, not accusing anyone in this case, of course.
- shusaku 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - 3y ago
imgabe 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
accrual 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
      Also a question of how long stuff will really stay around on the internet.
      - philpem 3y ago
        Depends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.
    - bombcar 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
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rig666 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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-.
  - 3y ago
kazinator 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Not only this, but accepting a donation is not an obligation to preserve something for an endless period of time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

chris_wot 3y ago

So why did they take the material? If you don’t want it, then don’t take it.

underlogic 3y ago
[flagged]
- zx8080 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
      Gross computer nerds refuse to learn from the past and keep reinventing the triangular wheel every 20 minutes. More news at eleven.
    - jumelles 3y ago
      I'm infinitely thankful most people don't think like this. History is a treasure.
    - pushedx 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    Right, Neural Networks were considered simply an academic curiousity for about 65 years. Disregarding the past is simply ignorance.
  - AlbertCory 3y 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 3y ago
      An old email I had once saved me from an expensive lawsuit.
  - Sakos 3y 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 3y ago
  This couldn’t be more wrong the past is extremely important especially in the age of abstraction
- indymike 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  > Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday One doesn't have a tomorrow without a yesterday.
- theodric 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    If not undoing mistakes from the 90’s…
zx8080 3y ago
Donation sometimes helps to write off some budget. Speaking generally, not accusing anyone in this case, of course.
shusaku 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- 3y ago

imgabe 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

accrual 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    Also a question of how long stuff will really stay around on the internet.
    - philpem 3y ago
      Depends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.
  - bombcar 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

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rig666 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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-.
- 3y ago

kazinator 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

Not only this, but accepting a donation is not an obligation to preserve something for an endless period of time.

deleted 3y ago
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