The Don Maslin Software Archive

On Sun, 15 May 2005 18:38:02 -0700 (PDT) Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: And if you hadn't accumulated it to give away to other people more interested, it would have all ended up in the dumpster at the point just before when you supposedly 'packratted' it. Sometimes one gets the idea here that if you don't mount each item on a piece of walnut with a brass plaque labeling it, you're just piling up junk. Lord, how I wish I had kept ('packratted' to use that dirty word) some of the computer-related things in the past I've had that I apparently wasn't "collecting" back at that point in time. There are people with some of the attitudes expressed here in Numismatics, too. Coin 'collectors' who view it as a genteel pastime. Lord knows they'll turn up their nose at that sack of mixed, circulated foreign coins I'm excited to find at a table at a show. I just love figuring out where each and every one of them comes from and the history of that place when they were minted and circulated among the people. I leave it to the 'gentlemen collectors' to fuss and fluster about the 'patina' on the particular specimens in the narrow series of coins they specialize in. Who's the better 'collector'? I guess it's decided by the 'professionals' who collect the fees and pay the custodians who install the velvet ropes at the shows. Whatever.