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I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

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Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#141

Post by zettabomb »

TylerE wrote: post #83
accrual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Rather 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.

There are multiple ongoing efforts to find or sometimes recreate media which has been lost to time, including media which was originally published only digitally. The difference is that I can make new furniture which looks similar to or even indistinguishable to older pieces, but it becomes quite difficult (essentially impossible) to recreate for example, early episodes of Doctor Who. In general, I'd have to say it's irresponsible to not at least look to see if someone else has a good quality digital copy first - surprisingly often, they do not.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#142

Post by weinzierl »

arexxbifs wrote: post #138
weinzierl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 fat…

I was replying to the parent comment.

Sorry and thanks for pointing it out. I should have read more carefully.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#143

Post by lupire »

epakai wrote: post #121
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 you…

Security through being offended at the idea of needing security is rarely a winning plan.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#144

Post by justsomehnguy »

MaanuAir wrote: post #127
accrual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is a lot of magazines and their CDs at archive.org.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#146

Post by jrumbut »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #115
lostemptations5 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#147

Post by im3w1l »

skissane wrote: post #124
philpem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 man…

I'm not part of this scene and I'm not a collector, so I my dispassionate perspective is that at some point the cost of quality insurance is greater than the benefit. For a very important issue of a very important magazine, of course, keep it around. For a less important one, maybe retaining 95% of the data at 5% of the cost is good enough.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#148

Post by danielfoster »

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.

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

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#149

Post by [deleted] »

Semaphor wrote: post #107
TylerE wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now try finding a solid wood table that doesn't cost $3,000+.

Literally the first result on the site I checked [0], solid wood table on sale for 339 €. Do you want to move the goalposts even further? [0]: https://www.otto.de/p/gozos-esstisch-scots-pine-series-essti...

[deleted]

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#150

Post by bonoboTP »

layer8 wrote: post #139
TylerE wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather 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.

> Real solid furniture is nearly impossibly to find new. No, it’s just become very expensive.

It always was expensive. Most people couldn't buy them, and if they had them, they'd pass them on for generations.

The difference is that today people don't think their grandkids will want to take decades old furniture in old style. They will probably live very far anyway and things change fast. Expectations and lifestyles are just different now.

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