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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

#81
post #42
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…

I 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.

How many backups are there of it? Recall that kernel.org was once completely lost and much of the source code apparently had no mirrors.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#82

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.

> A lot of old stuff has no value to anyone.

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#83
post #28

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…

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#84
post #42
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…

I 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.

A 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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#85

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.

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#86
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a new phenomenon that culture is still absorbing, a result of abundance and progress. Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.

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 antiques and dishwear.

I hope my parents don’t burden us with a storage unit full of junk. Just because they treasure it doesn’t mean we can or even want to become the next stewards of it. It’s all going to the landfill.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#87
post #74

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.

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.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#88
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? The reason why people don't cherish these types of things is they are rational. Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday This reply hanging off a thread about prior art is telling. As surprising as it may be, the past can tell a lot about the future, as the past was present at a point, and the future is now. Take an example about AI…

> a thread about prior art since I wrote that: it's actually pretty rare that a defendant can actually use a piece of prior art in a case, but there's always a hope that ONE time, you will. The other difficulty is that lawyers and jurors will make fun of anything that's too old. I know, it isn't fair, but you do have to overcome a built-in bias against ancient stuff. I realize you're not talking about litigation, but…

An old email I had once saved me from an expensive lawsuit.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#89
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? Sure, no need to study history. Just pull to refresh every second and don't remember anything. And also, defund the national archives too, they are apparently useless. /s

No this group wastes so much time trying to relive the 70's and 80's they're missing an even greater paradigm shift unfolding right here and now. Someone has to say enough with the tinkering already. It's a waste of time. Yesterday's people are dead. Not relevant - dead and gone. That party's over, move on. This is not healthy

Gross computer nerds refuse to learn from the past and keep reinventing the triangular wheel every 20 minutes. More news at eleven.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#90

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…

Where are you going to store the paper? And keep it from degrading?

Paper is in fact pretty durable. A lot of History came through millennial papers.

I’m not saying that computers manuals will for sure stand the test of time for a the thousand years to come, but as long as they are protected from fire, they are probably a more reliable storage than a digital scan which will need humans to backup them regularly if they want to survive their physical media.

Sure digital backups, especially of PDF files, are easy and cheap, but they require an active human effort to keep the system alive.

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