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> 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 ar
by 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 agoI 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 agoYou'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 agoAlso a question of how long stuff will really stay around on the internet.
- philpem 3y agoDepends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.
- bombcar 3y agoPeople 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.
- ghaff 3y agoAnd I'm not sure I can go online and find a complete set of Byte Magazine much less the Boston Computer Society newsletter or something even more niche. Probably I could find a lot of stuff if I went to enough libraries but it certainly isn't all available and nicely indexed on the open web.
- AlbertCory 3y agoExactly that. The major magazines have been done already. If you have something obscure, there's a good chance it hasn't.
- Sakos 3y agoIn which languages? And who has access to the digital copies? And how complete? This isn't as clear cut or solved as you make it out to be.
- lmpdev 3y agoThis is why I data hoard I have friends who are Serbian living elsewhere and are about to start a family They have no Serbian children’s media afaik (and it’s not exactly easy to find) I found ~200GB of Serbian dubbed children’s media someone painstakingly digitised on /t/ I’m keeping it for when they eventually have those kids Unless shown otherwise, assume nothing is archived correctly, completely or at all
- weregiraffe 3y agoWhat will happen to your hoard after you are gone?
- ironmagma 3y agoHow many backups are there of it? Recall that kernel.org was once completely lost and much of the source code apparently had no mirrors.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoA fraction has been digitized, and most of it still quite poorly scanned. Try reading some, try actually using any of the schematics and other technucal drawings, a lot looks ok at a glance, then turns out to be merely better tgan nothing when you actually try to use it the same way you would have used the original. Every few years the definition of practical scanner quality and file size increases by 2x or more. A fax quality scan is infinitely better than nothing, so it's great that such scans were made as soon as that became possible, but a few years later scanners became 10x better and it became practical to work with 10x larger file sizes. So all of those documents really need to be scanned again. And the same process needs to hapoen yey again at least one more time. Even very good scans from only a few years ago are still only good compared to old scans. They are still practically garbage compared to the original print. And much of what is currently digitized is precarious, one lawsuit or lapse in funding or ceo decision away from the service being shut down. I've already lost tons of stuff I actually paid for to services that no longer exist, let alone free services. Right now a lot of eggs are in archive.org and they are a charity that paints a huge "kill me" target on their own back every day. It makes no sense to operate on the assumption they will never become the library of alexandria. Digitizing existing printed material is not remotely a done job. Not even barely scratched the surface if you step back and look at how we are still in the first few seconds of eternity.
- theodric 3y agoI may have the only omnibus of PET Benelux Exchange magazines out there, which seem to be entirely unavailable online. There are exceptions.
- telmnstr 3y agoScan and share!
- theodric 3y agoYeah, I had grand plans. I even did one issue, and OCR'd it as well, but then COVID happened and work got busy and now you can fast-forward four years when I've moved countries again, hopefully for the last time. I know where they are, which is good. Need to disassemble the book-edge scanner and clean the underside of the glass off because it's all fogged. I also need to stand up a VM that can talk to the crappy OpticBook drivers. And I'm behind on my start-of-season farm work, which keeps expanding fractally the deeper I go. That dependency stack is what's in my way at the moment. Eventually, I swear!
- varjag 3y agoA good third of HP Application Notes is still not digitized. Same with many other publications that aren't Dr. Dobbs' or BYTE.
- TylerE 3y agoRather the reverse. Any publication is easily available in PDF. Real solid furniture is nearly impossibly to find new. Everthing is particleboard and vaneers, or if higher end, mdf and veneers.
- Semaphor 3y agoWhat? I bought a bed last year. It’s solid wood, only the bottom of the under-bed-drawers being some kind of glued material. And it wasn’t even some super high-end thing, including the drawers, I paid just below 1000 € for it. When searching for a bed to buy (as I wanted solid wood), I even found many stores specializing in solid wood furniture.
- saulpw 3y agoBut notably, it's not old. No one wants the old stuff anymore, no matter how good.
- iainmerrick 3y agoThere's a big difference between "no-one" and "not enough people to make it worthwhile storing and transporting large and heavy furniture so it can be sold at a reasonable price". Friction is a thing.
- TylerE 3y agoand not of us live in cities with furniture showrooms. The nearest stores with halfway decent stuff are like 3 hours from here - and that's just to look, never mind the hassles of arranging I'm actually in the middle of getting a custom computer/music desk shipped cross country right now. Not solid wood either, and the thing still cost almost $2k with shipping.
- Semaphor 3y agoCheck the comment I replied to, it's talking about new furniture
- 3y ago
- MaanuAir 3y agoSome French people spent the time to digitize an impressive amount of French magazines: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/ https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/ I don’t know for other countries though.
- pyb 3y agoA few of these French magazines have cult status these days : Tilt, etc. I wonder if that's the case in the English-speaking magazine world.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoThere is a lot of magazines and their CDs at archive.org.
- tudorw 3y agoIf you have the right ones from the right time you can sell them for between £17 and £35 a pop...how would I know...
- ghaff 3y ago>they can be digitized to take up virtually no physical space But someone has to do it if it hasn't already been done. And that costs money/time.
- AlbertCory 3y agoWhen I said "PC" that was a noun, not an adjective. There was a "PC magazine" by that name.