18 Mar
2007
18 Mar
'07
2:44 p.m.
Once the
content of those diskettes of yours are placed into a
repository, that content would be protected against loss to the
community. Yes, the physical disks would remain at risk, and you
should take whatever measures you feel are appropriate for them,
as you would any other item of significance in your estate.
Ah, but there's the rub in some cases. While the content may be
interesting, the physical media may well be more important. For
example, old Drivetec/Kodak disks and drives are more interesting for
archival purposes than their contents. from group effort. I suppose we could all get together
and build a
climate controller warehouse ... but why stop at media, why not provide
storage of everyone's collection. The answer of course is that we don't
have the resources for such an undertaking, and even if we did,
geographical separation would make it impractical.
The B requirement however can benefit greatly from group effort. Instead
of sitting around mourning the loss of Dons archive, we could coordinate
our energy into building a data/code resources that would lasts - thats
all I'm saying.
This is stuff that I've collected as a normal part
of business--I've
mentioned before that I'm not a collector, so it's unlikely that I'm
going to expend much effort trying to preserve this material. And my
estate will be less interested.
As noted above, being the holder of the physical artifacts, it's up to
you to take whatever measures (if any) you feel are appropriate.
Please note that this is not to denigrate your
original observations
or statements, but rather to point out that potentially valuable
items to collectors are often just so much flotsam to the rest of the
world.
And that's what will cause a lot of artifacts to pass from this world
into the landfill.
Very well said, and completely true. But we can do something about the
material that we are currently holding. Code is unique in that it was
designed from the get-go to be readable by a computer - hence it's less
difficult to archive than other mediums that we value enough to build
into archives. Once the right equipment is set up, it's much easier to
image a disk than it is to scan a book (esp. a bound book).
I was thinking about why there are plenty of
centuries-old violins
and other musical instruments around (I play a tuba that's nearing
the century mark and it's probably worth at least as much as it was
when it was new) while computers seem to be disappearing into the
bowels of the earth at a fast clip. Of course the answer is that a
violin made in 1720 is every bit as useful as it was when it was new;
something that can't be said for an old computer.
It's not just that - We have an entire industry dedicated to convincing
everyone that computers built as recently as one year ago is usless and
obsolete. How can we expect anyone to appreciate systems that don't
even look like the publics general perception of a computer.
I sometimes get invited to bring systems from my collection to local
schools to show the students some of the history of computing.
I can still recall the first time I did this, not knowing what to expect,
I took an Altair, set it all up, and gave a demonstration of how you could
toggle in code from the front panel, how to execute the bootstrap ROM to
bring up an OS from floppy disk, how you could communicated with it via an
ADM3A terminal, and capped of the demo with a quick peek at some text based
games...
When I asked if there were any questions, this little guy stood up and came
up to the front of the room. He slowly looked over the entire system, ran
his gaze over the blinkin lights and then the terminal, finally he turned to
me and asked:
"Why did anyone ever want a computer that wasn't any good?"
A lot of old brass and percussion instruments end up
as decorator
items, hung on walls and whatnot. A friend recovered two fairly
expensive (>$30K each) Italian violins from the walls of the local
American Legion hall. An old Civil-War era saxhorn that had been
made into a lamp found its way to eBay recently and went for a couple
of thousand, even with a couple of holes bored in it--a restorer will
eventually bring it back to playable condition.
I'd rather see an old bombardon have a hole bored through to bell to
hang on a wall than see it get melted down as scrap.
This is sort of a wacky idea, but since old computers generally have
less utility as computers to people, how about encouraging their use
as decor? That might keep them preserved longer.
:-)
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html