16 May
2005
16 May
'05
7:15 a.m.
On Sun, 15 May 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
On Sun, 15 May 2005 shoppa_classiccmp at
trailing-edge.com wrote:
On the heels of my foolish posting (see accompanying apology) this
sounds a bit off, but here goes:
But don't archivists make their archives available? Clearly, Don's
is not. If Don had been loosely operating an informal library,
then his family would have at least a faint handle on what to do
with it.
Don was operating as an informal library. However, when I spoke to his
wife last year not too long after Don passed away, she explained to me
that she was completely unaware of what he was doing.
are you a
packrat (as Don apparently was) or a collector?
Don was neither. He was a true archivist, in this case working
for the CP/M community. My attempt at a point earlier was that he was
packratting, making a big
pile of stuff with no real plans for the future. This appears to be
fact.
The only thing Don didn't do was plan for an "unplanned departure". As
far as we know, he never got around to writing a will for his computer
collection. But Don was definitely not a packrat. He was an archivist of
system disks and actively collected and catalogued them. It remains to be
seen how universal his catalog was but hopefully we'll get a chance to
find out.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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