Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

ascii.textfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 227 posts

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#121

Post by epakai »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #80

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…

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#122

Post by philpem »

skissane wrote: post #38
shrubble wrote: post #15

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

We shouldn't throw away the physical paper copies just because something has been scanned. In any large collection of scanned documents, you are going to get scanning errors/etc – you can catch a lot of these with quality control, but some will always slip through the cracks. (And, volunteer efforts to scan old computer documentation often don't have the time and resources for the best quality control.) If the origin…

The maximum useful resolution you can really get out of offset-printed magazines is around 200dpi. Scanners have been able to do 400dpi for many years, and have been stuck at the 1200dpi plateau for about as long.

Sometimes you just don't need a better scan, because you're just doubling up on data you already have.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#123

Post by philpem »

wolpoli wrote: post #16

> 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.

If they're still useful, why throw them away?

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#124

Post by skissane »

philpem wrote: post #122
skissane wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't throw away the physical paper copies just because something has been scanned. In any large collection of scanned documents, you are going to get scanning errors/etc – you can catch a lot of these with quality control, but some will always slip through the cracks. (And, volunteer efforts to scan old computer documentation often don't have the time and resources for the best quality control.) If the origin…

The maximum useful resolution you can really get out of offset-printed magazines is around 200dpi. Scanners have been able to do 400dpi for many years, and have been stuck at the 1200dpi plateau for about as long. Sometimes you just don't need a better scan, because you're just doubling up on data you already have.

There are lots of other issues that can occur with scans beyond just the raw resolution: misaligned pages (part of the text accidentally cut off from the scan), accidentally skipped pages, colour illustrations scanned in black and white, etc.

With a sufficiently robust QA process, you may be able to catch most of these issues. However, you can never reduce the probability to zero, and people scanning old computer manuals don't always have the necessary resources to implement the most robust QA process.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#125

Post by Brian_K_White »

somnic wrote: post #14
AlbertCory wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#126

Post by weinzierl »

arexxbifs wrote: post #102
throwaway5959 wrote: post #80

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…

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 c…

"Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire event by the conduct of a single speaker [..]"

The answer was extremely rude. Had they said, they got rid of the documents, because they'd valued them differently from Jason, that'd have been rude and disappointing, but maybe understandable to some degree.

At least these things happen. A former landlady of mine had donated a rare and precious motorcycle she inherited from her father to a local museum. When she coincidentally learned about 10 years later that the museum was about to sell it, she bought it back for a lot of money. Donations can sometimes turn out not the way we want.

In my opinion, saying they just kept the boxes was appalling and beyond disrespectful and I think Jason's reaction is understandable. Of course we've only heard one side...

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#127

Post by MaanuAir »

accrual wrote: post #28
AlbertCory wrote: post #3

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…

Some French people spent the time to digitize an impressive amount of French magazines: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/

I don’t know for other countries though.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#128

Post by haspok »

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

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#129

Post by glimshe »

haspok wrote: post #128

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

When you run a vintage computing festival, and accept historical material from one of the most prominent conservationists of computer artifacts alive, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing "old magazines" away.

These guys were not goodwill accepting random trinkets from random people. Jason Scott is basically saying "I discovered they are hacks, and I will not support hacks"

Post reply on HN