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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

#161

Post by gtirloni »

ghaff wrote: post #158
Brian_K_White wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, they should have tried to give it back or, ideally, just not accepted in the first place absent a concrete plan. And, yes, it's worth understanding that not everyone (including university archives as well as volunteer organizations) has the level of enthusiasm about donated physical "stuff" as you do even when you think they really should for whatever reason. However, as someone involved in an archiving project…

I'd expect people working in a organization focused on preserving or promoting vintage stuff to be the most enthusiastic about that material and handle it with great care.

My mom couldn't care less about computers and she called me to ask if I wanted to keep some floppy disks before she threw them out.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#162

Post by ghaff »

bombcar wrote: post #157
germinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

And 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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#163

Post by gosub100 »

imgabe wrote: post #74
AlbertCory wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This is what I do, for Craigslist instead of posting in free I'll post in the category with a $1 price and say free in the description. Free is scanned by desperate people looking to make easy money. Due to competition, that requires being first to claim stuff, well before you are sure you can find a buyer for it.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#165

Post by ghaff »

gtirloni wrote: post #161
ghaff wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they should have tried to give it back or, ideally, just not accepted in the first place absent a concrete plan. And, yes, it's worth understanding that not everyone (including university archives as well as volunteer organizations) has the level of enthusiasm about donated physical "stuff" as you do even when you think they really should for whatever reason. However, as someone involved in an archiving project…

I'd expect people working in a organization focused on preserving or promoting vintage stuff to be the most enthusiastic about that material and handle it with great care. My mom couldn't care less about computers and she called me to ask if I wanted to keep some floppy disks before she threw them out.

>My mom couldn't care less about computers and she called me to ask if I wanted to keep some floppy disks before she threw them out.

And I've thrown out a ton of floppies and old games. You can't save everything just because it had some meaning to you once.

Enthusiastic or not, dealing with boxes and boxes of old magazines means spending lots of money and/or lots of time which is a high bar. (Though, as I wrote, they should have either just said no or returned it.)

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#166

Post by ghaff »

zimpenfish wrote: post #87
imgabe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#167

Post by II2II »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #112
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.

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.

No argument there. On the other hand, we cannot preserve every last item. Seeming as these were described as publications, there would have been multiple copies produced. Hopefully the VCF did their research prior to disposal to ensure multiple copies still exist (that are accessible to people, in better condition, and in their original form).

Jason Scott certainly has the right to be upset about what happened. It takes time to put together and maintain a collection. He entrusted that collection in the VCF's care. There is probably very good reason why he ought to be upset. Chances are that someone else entrusted those publications to his care. If that is the case, the VCF managed to violate the trust that someone else placed in Jason Scott, and not just Jason Scott's trust in the VCF.

That being said, humanity creates mountains of stuff. We cannot afford to keep every last example, or even every last example that collectors manage to get their hands on. For all of this talk about the current generation not valuing old things and older generations preserving things for generations, well, that never really happened. At least not in the way people are suggesting. In most cases, those old things were "preserved" because they were significantly cheaper to maintain than to replace. Even in the case of publications, one would find that most libraries ended up disposing of publications and only a handful specialized in archiving materials.

In the end, what we should be doing is looking towards the future while keeping an eye on the past. By only looking forward, we miss the richness of our past and any lessons it may have to offer. By only looking to the past, we embracing stagnation and placing improvements in the human condition at risk. While the latter may sound extreme, we only have so many resources (even in our age of plenty).

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#169

Post by ghaff »

ryandrake wrote: post #86
postmodest wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

From personal experience, other people's storage units that are filled with stuff kept against an ill-defined future just cost money and cause someone else a headache sooner or later.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#170

Post by dangus »

amichlin wrote: post #160

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…

I think the silliest part about this “saga” is that Jason is leading a one-man boycott at his own detriment. He’s depriving himself of a social community meeting place for his passion because his donation to the organization that facilitates those meetups wasn’t put to some kind of completely unspecified use.

> A number of years later, I contacted the Vintage Computer Federation to ask how the magazines were doing, if they were part of a project, or if I needed to transfer them elsewhere.

If you read between the lines on that quote, it’s clear that Jason doesn’t even know what someone is supposed to do with all this stuff, but he called up years later in hopes that someone else came up with an idea.

If he wants the materials to be part of a project, he should have spent the time needed to make them into a project. But really, Jason doesn’t know what to do with them, that’s why he donated them in the first place.

It’s not much different than dropping off an attic full of miscellaneous paintings to the Met and expecting them to put them in an exhibit.

If you want to make a qualified donation, make a qualified donation. Write up a contract that tells the organization what it’s allowed to do with your donation. Otherwise, anything is fair game.

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