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.
> 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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire event by the conduct of a single speaker, but to each their own, and all that.
To answer your question, yes, people are still writing malware for old systems. They don't even have to be network connected: computer viruses can spread perfectly fine from other media as well. People still send each other floppies in the mail.
It's not as prevalent as on modern mainstream systems of course, but for example, a new Amiga virus started spreading a couple of years ago. The Jackal bootblock virus overwrites the bootblock on floppy disks, possibly rendering them unusable.
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.
The 8-bit era was an interesting time because DRAM memory had finally become cheap and there was no clear cut market leader that had a definite average over the others. This lead to a lot of interesting innovation in the market, some truly unique designs, companies who bet big, some won and some bet it all and lost. The software industry for micros was also just getting started.
There was this whole period where machines were getting small enough that an individual person might be able to afford a computer, and away from unit record systems that were basically glorified accounting machines that worked with punched cards and paper tape into things such as refreshable text and graphics displays, sound chips, etc.
Why preserve it? Well if you want to know where you are going it helps to know where you've been; and yes, there's a heavy dose of nostalgia there for those of us who grew up with these machines.
Have you never wondered what the GUI and mouse was like BEFORE Windows and Mac? You could actually try it on a Lisa or Xerox Star, an Amiga or Atari ST, or using GEOS on the C64..
Joe Decuir is the man - there are a number of really good presentations of his on youtube. And the parent is talking about Fujinet, which is all the rage:
It is not possible to infect 8-bit computers from the 1970s and early 1980s with malware. The operating system is on a dedicated chip that would have to be physically replaced with a new chip that contains the crippled OS. This is in stark contrast to more modern computers where the OS can be modified by software (e.g. malware).
He's intensely invested in it, and sometimes comes off frustrated at the lack of interest (based on what I see on mastodon, happen to share instances). The suggestion of malware was probably somewhat offensive as it is antithical to bringing disparate retro system users together.
Sorry that happened, but I think he is an unusual case. Hoping to provide some understanding for why it played out that way even though your question was reasonable.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
[+] [-] ehPReth|1 year ago|reply
prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] accrual|1 year ago|reply
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. :)
[+] [-] somnic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chefandy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] knighthack|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] imgabe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ip26|1 year ago|reply
Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.
[+] [-] chris_wot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rig666|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|1 year ago|reply
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 Mostly in Italian, a few in English, French and Spanish language.
[+] [-] kazinator|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lostemptations5|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flohofwoe|1 year ago|reply
It's always been like that unfortunately, but wait just a couple of centuries, and it will become valuable ;)
[+] [-] danielfoster|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5959|1 year ago|reply
VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.
[+] [-] leidenfrost|1 year ago|reply
Most of these festivals are more about shared nostalgia than objective appreciation of technology from a specific time.
Like watching one of those videos from LGR. Watching him power up an old computer and hearing that "thunk" sound is beautiful.
And slighty offtopic, but I think nostalgia is fun when shared with people. Being nostalgic alone is a mix of warm and sad.
[+] [-] arexxbifs|1 year ago|reply
To answer your question, yes, people are still writing malware for old systems. They don't even have to be network connected: computer viruses can spread perfectly fine from other media as well. People still send each other floppies in the mail.
It's not as prevalent as on modern mainstream systems of course, but for example, a new Amiga virus started spreading a couple of years ago. The Jackal bootblock virus overwrites the bootblock on floppy disks, possibly rendering them unusable.
https://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/desc/txt/jackal.htm
[+] [-] tschak|1 year ago|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.
[+] [-] elian5551212|1 year ago|reply
There was this whole period where machines were getting small enough that an individual person might be able to afford a computer, and away from unit record systems that were basically glorified accounting machines that worked with punched cards and paper tape into things such as refreshable text and graphics displays, sound chips, etc.
Why preserve it? Well if you want to know where you are going it helps to know where you've been; and yes, there's a heavy dose of nostalgia there for those of us who grew up with these machines.
Have you never wondered what the GUI and mouse was like BEFORE Windows and Mac? You could actually try it on a Lisa or Xerox Star, an Amiga or Atari ST, or using GEOS on the C64..
[+] [-] justin66|1 year ago|reply
https://fujinet.online/
It's too bad Cherryhomes shot down an interesting question.
[+] [-] moorejh28|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] epakai|1 year ago|reply
Sorry that happened, but I think he is an unusual case. Hoping to provide some understanding for why it played out that way even though your question was reasonable.
[+] [-] spectrumero|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sellam|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sellam|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drewzero1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ssernikk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] textfiles|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fiforpg|1 year ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY
[+] [-] lupire|1 year ago|reply
Vintage Computer Festival should be capitalized.
It is a specific organization he had a bad experience with.
[+] [-] shrubble|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|1 year ago|reply
People not into it might get confused...
[+] [-] wolpoli|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.
[+] [-] cwyers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
Wondering if "ASCII by Jason Scott" is only ASCII, and if so, then is the charset=UTF-8 needed.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FerretFred|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] da39a3ee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amichlin|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zer00eyz|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]