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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree, but that also requires cataloging the donation somehow so that the donor's contact information is associated. If it all lived in the boxes until it was removed (however it was) then it would be easy to have said 'hey, we can't use this, and we can't store it, we're planning to rid ourselves of it, can you help us find it a new home?' Especially if the donor had placed contact info inside or on the boxes.
But there's lots of ways that information may not filter to the big pile of old magazines disintegrating in the salt air.
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.
I like going to estate sales. Sometimes you find interesting things.
But mostly, it's just piles of, frankly, crap. And in a weird way, it's sort of helping me deal with some of my tendencies to collect crap. Once I'm dead, 75% of it will be thrown away by someone hired to deal with the estate, maybe 50% of the rest will be sold, and the rest will once again go in the garbage. That screwdriver I'm keeping even though it doesn't work well? It's going in the landfill anyway. Might as well go tomorrow, as in 50 years.
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.
>> 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
I've said this before, but it bears repeating.
The joy of collections comes in the collecting, not the final collection. Nobody wants to inherit "someone else's collection" - they want to collect themselves.
Secondly, 95% of your collection has little to zero value. 4% has some value. Perhaps 1% has significant value. There's a power law in play here. I -urge- you to turn the valuable parts into cash yourself before you pass. The coat of -identifying- the valuable parts dwarfs their value.
Therefore when you pass, your survivors will either give it away for nothing, or sell to a dealer for the price of transport. More likely it'll go to the dump. If this pains you then -dispose it yourself-.
If you have prized parts, those 5 items in a sea of thousands, make sure they are stored separately, clearly labeled and done one knows about them. They will then at least get donated. If you think they have value that can be realised -then you must dispose it yourself-.
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.
In the first post he absolves a certain guy, so I’d guess it’s just a matter of someone in the org thinking they were valuable, only for the next guy to come to a different conclusion.
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.
> 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).
> 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 old yugoslav magazines and books online, that is fun to skm through while on the toilet or in bed (instead of reddit or youtube), but keping, preserving, dusting etc. all that paper would be a pain.
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.
Yeah and being nostalgic around people who don't share it is difficult, since if you talk about it then they will find you insufferable.
Unrelated but I can remember when a friend of mine came back from a long, glamorous trip and suddenly stopped sharing in our usual moments of nostalgia. They acted like they were embarrassed. It sucked because it made me believe that they were ashamed of who they used to be, and I felt sorry for them. This person has since made great efforts to adopt a newer, more glamorous persona. I miss when they were genuine. I miss my friend.
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.
"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...
With regard to the show, I didn’t want to pile on, but here we go:
There weren’t that many talks (the primary thing I was interested in), the trade show section was pretty small, and there wasn’t really much for newcomers to explain why this old hardware deserves preservation.
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:
I just watched the video from that presentation and it didn't sound like anything so egregious that it would make you want to never attend a similar event was said (we couldn't hear your actual question very well). I get that there's a little more to your decision than that, but still.
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).
Is the question about infecting the 8-bit computers connected via the ESP32-based FujiNet device, or about infecting the FujiNet device itself?
As Cherryhomes himself points out, that device is VASTLY more capable than the vintage hardware/software to which it's connecting. A compromised FujiNet running in a trusted network would be a significant security issue.
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 have various electronic/computer things that various people would silently scream if they knew I was tossing them. I'll probably make a nominal effort to find a home but just a nominal effort and I bet they'll end up in someone else's attic after they've played around for a day or so.
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.
Storing stuff takes space and effort. Cataloging even more so. Making it available to others is a jump in magnitude.
Eventually, it can become untenable.
Organizations like this tend to not lack donors. What they lack is the capacity to cope with donations. Time, labor, space, money are all finite, regardless of their mission.
Even the Salvation Army will refuse things like furniture. It’s not carte blanche. That said, I’ll donate even ratty clothing to the SA because I know they’re at the tail end of consumer product life, they inspect and sort all the incoming clothing, and their discards end up bundled for recycle or other purposes.
I donate to let them have first crack at it with their expertise rather than condemn it to a landfill directly. Give that old ‘92 Comdex t-shirt one last chance.
I don’t know anything in detail about VCF. I don’t know if the IEEE has archives of everything already.
I know there’s an effort to scan several hundred Computer Shopper magazines. I know there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of time setting up a system to scan a very large stack of DEC VAX microfiche.
I guess its a shame these magazines didn’t fall into the hands of someone with the zeal these other folks have for their projects.
I have also learned to not question the motives and projects of folks in the vintage computer scene. Not my time, not my project, who am I to judge.
It was with a bit of a heavy heart when my large collection of Dr. Dobbs magazines went into the recycling bin.
When I cleaned out my grandfather’s house, I came back with (among other things) several dozen Popular Mechanics magazines from the 40s. They were all 200+ pages. Talk about a snapshot of a different world. But after 10+ years sitting in a box in the garage, and a house move later, I kept three and the rest went into the blue bin.
Which brings me to my final point. If you have a collection, if you have any care about its disposition, you should do that yourself to other enthusiasts that may share your interests. Because your heirs, or the people task with cleaning up after your gone, will likely just put it in a large dumpster to be carted away.
But then, even if you do get it to others, it may well end up in landfill anyway.
Yeah. The reality is that your old computer gear, computer software, or magazines will probably just end up with someone else who is something of a packrat about such things. They'll get some momentary pleasure out of it, it will end up in an attic basement, and the cycle will continue.
By all means leave out a few things that have particular significance to you but, by and large, I've learned that less is generally more.
Getting rid of books is part of running a library, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is part of running a museum or similar organization. That said, there are so many collectors out there I feel it would be better to at least try to find a home, even if it means selling them. It's easy for me to say that because I don't have to actually do it.
> Getting rid of books is part of running a library
It depends on what kind of library we are talking about.
Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – they throw out books all the time. They have quite limited space, so they can't keep books which are no longer relevant to their target audience.
National libraries, research libraries of leading universities – many of them rarely or never throw books out. I remember, when I was a university student, finding IBM 1400 manuals sitting on the shelves in the stacks. They are probably still sitting there. I believe they turned their last 1400 off in the 1970s.
I remember borrowing a book, and according to the due date stamp inside its cover, the last person to borrow it before me, had done so 40 years prior. You could tell the books that hadn't been borrowed in a long time, because they still had punch cards in them, from back when the library had used punch cards to track book borrowing. If you actually borrowed such a book, they'd remove the punched card and discard it as part of the borrowing process. I bet if I went back today (20+ years later), there would still be books with punched cards in them.
There's difference between archive and a library. Also, why didn't they process in the first place then? And for it being "hard to pass over" - it wasn't hard for them to have him drive 70 miles and pack all on his budget??
I mean, OK, sure, but if you're the museum that discards this material as a matter of course, well, now you know why Jason Scott is going to spend the next several years shredding your reputation online, right? It's not the final battle between good and evil. He's clear up front what the issue is. You can care what he has to say or not.
The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
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.
Readit News
prior discussion of the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150
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.
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. :)
I don’t know for other countries though.
But someone has to do it if it hasn't already been done. And that costs money/time.
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.
But there's lots of ways that information may not filter to the big pile of old magazines disintegrating in the salt air.
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.
But mostly, it's just piles of, frankly, crap. And in a weird way, it's sort of helping me deal with some of my tendencies to collect crap. Once I'm dead, 75% of it will be thrown away by someone hired to deal with the estate, maybe 50% of the rest will be sold, and the rest will once again go in the garbage. That screwdriver I'm keeping even though it doesn't work well? It's going in the landfill anyway. Might as well go tomorrow, as in 50 years.
If you offer it for free, someone will take it. But asking ANY money is agreeing to wait a long, long time.
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've said this before, but it bears repeating.
The joy of collections comes in the collecting, not the final collection. Nobody wants to inherit "someone else's collection" - they want to collect themselves.
Secondly, 95% of your collection has little to zero value. 4% has some value. Perhaps 1% has significant value. There's a power law in play here. I -urge- you to turn the valuable parts into cash yourself before you pass. The coat of -identifying- the valuable parts dwarfs their value.
Therefore when you pass, your survivors will either give it away for nothing, or sell to a dealer for the price of transport. More likely it'll go to the dump. If this pains you then -dispose it yourself-.
If you have prized parts, those 5 items in a sea of thousands, make sure they are stored separately, clearly labeled and done one knows about them. They will then at least get donated. If you think they have value that can be realised -then you must dispose it yourself-.
Old furniture used to be handed down and treasured for generations. Suddenly, not anymore.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 old yugoslav magazines and books online, that is fun to skm through while on the toilet or in bed (instead of reddit or youtube), but keping, preserving, dusting etc. all that paper would be a pain.
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It's always been like that unfortunately, but wait just a couple of centuries, and it will become valuable ;)
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VCF SoCal was my first and last vintage computer festival.
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.
Unrelated but I can remember when a friend of mine came back from a long, glamorous trip and suddenly stopped sharing in our usual moments of nostalgia. They acted like they were embarrassed. It sucked because it made me believe that they were ashamed of who they used to be, and I felt sorry for them. This person has since made great efforts to adopt a newer, more glamorous persona. I miss when they were genuine. I miss my friend.
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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
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...
With regard to the show, I didn’t want to pile on, but here we go:
There weren’t that many talks (the primary thing I was interested in), the trade show section was pretty small, and there wasn’t really much for newcomers to explain why this old hardware deserves preservation.
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.
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..
https://fujinet.online/
It's too bad Cherryhomes shot down an interesting question.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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?
Storing stuff takes space and effort. Cataloging even more so. Making it available to others is a jump in magnitude.
Eventually, it can become untenable.
Organizations like this tend to not lack donors. What they lack is the capacity to cope with donations. Time, labor, space, money are all finite, regardless of their mission.
Even the Salvation Army will refuse things like furniture. It’s not carte blanche. That said, I’ll donate even ratty clothing to the SA because I know they’re at the tail end of consumer product life, they inspect and sort all the incoming clothing, and their discards end up bundled for recycle or other purposes.
I donate to let them have first crack at it with their expertise rather than condemn it to a landfill directly. Give that old ‘92 Comdex t-shirt one last chance.
I don’t know anything in detail about VCF. I don’t know if the IEEE has archives of everything already.
I know there’s an effort to scan several hundred Computer Shopper magazines. I know there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of time setting up a system to scan a very large stack of DEC VAX microfiche.
I guess its a shame these magazines didn’t fall into the hands of someone with the zeal these other folks have for their projects.
I have also learned to not question the motives and projects of folks in the vintage computer scene. Not my time, not my project, who am I to judge.
It was with a bit of a heavy heart when my large collection of Dr. Dobbs magazines went into the recycling bin.
When I cleaned out my grandfather’s house, I came back with (among other things) several dozen Popular Mechanics magazines from the 40s. They were all 200+ pages. Talk about a snapshot of a different world. But after 10+ years sitting in a box in the garage, and a house move later, I kept three and the rest went into the blue bin.
Which brings me to my final point. If you have a collection, if you have any care about its disposition, you should do that yourself to other enthusiasts that may share your interests. Because your heirs, or the people task with cleaning up after your gone, will likely just put it in a large dumpster to be carted away.
But then, even if you do get it to others, it may well end up in landfill anyway.
By all means leave out a few things that have particular significance to you but, by and large, I've learned that less is generally more.
It depends on what kind of library we are talking about.
Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – they throw out books all the time. They have quite limited space, so they can't keep books which are no longer relevant to their target audience.
National libraries, research libraries of leading universities – many of them rarely or never throw books out. I remember, when I was a university student, finding IBM 1400 manuals sitting on the shelves in the stacks. They are probably still sitting there. I believe they turned their last 1400 off in the 1970s.
I remember borrowing a book, and according to the due date stamp inside its cover, the last person to borrow it before me, had done so 40 years prior. You could tell the books that hadn't been borrowed in a long time, because they still had punch cards in them, from back when the library had used punch cards to track book borrowing. If you actually borrowed such a book, they'd remove the punched card and discard it as part of the borrowing process. I bet if I went back today (20+ years later), there would still be books with punched cards in them.
The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY