Manuals Plus: The Wrap-Up — May 10, 2026
Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all.
That took longer.
As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive. It is, essentially, all the manuals that will be digitized or could be digitized, sans sets I’ll explain about shortly.
In other words, the loop is now complete. Saved, stored, moved, now online for anyone to read.
If somehow you missed this apparently core event of what people think of when they think of me, there’s so many weblog posts it’s almost weird to list them all:
In Realtime: Saving 25,000 Manuals
In Realtime: Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
In Realtime: We are Barely Halfway Done
In Realtime: Day 2 Felt Like Week 4
In Realtime: It is Done (Done physically saving the manuals, anyway)
A Small Dark Detour
In Realtime: Post-Mortem
A Little Bit of the Manuals
In Realtime: Some Initial Sorting and the Power of Two
The Manual Rescue: A High and Low Day
The Manual Rescue: Take Two, and Please Help
In Realtime: Digital Heaven (And a Call for Donations)
That last one really felt like the end (dated February 2024), but in fact it took a little longer to finish it all off. And that happened this year.
For anyone who doesn’t want to scroll through a dozen long-winded and repetitive posts about the process (aka “I ain’t reading all that – I’m sorry, or congratulations”), I’ll summarize it as:
Was told about a warehouse of manuals being thrown out. Came down to discuss the situation. Negotiated a week hold. Got dozens of people to show up, thousands of dollars to pack it all up and move it and store it, moved it from one storage unit to another location (closed coffeehouse in a mall), moved it all to California, got volunteers to sort the hell out of it, ended up with dozens of pallets, determined some not to be scanned, a group covered it being scanned, we’re done.
Only took eleven years and one tiny heart attack.
And there we are: a collection of 13,000 manuals.
Let’s go quickly down some frequently-yelled questions from the crowd, and what’s next.
First, what do you mean there are some unscanned manuals?
Well, funny story. Two companies still have manuals as a product and as part of their product line and are preferring to go through them, as well as that, in the event they make them public, their scans will be much better and thorough than the pile in this collection. Those companies are HP (now Agilent Technologies and Keysight) and Tektronix. So, it made no sense to scan those pallets. We still have everything, and if it came down to it, manuals truly lost could be found, but the cost to speculatively scan them would have doubled everything, at least. So we have the manuals, just not digital forms.
Next, who ended up covering for all this scanning?
Money was really the reason this all took so long. Scanning thousands of manuals, some of them hundreds of pages long, is an expensive project unless you truly think you can just make Steven and His Epson Perfection scanner do this on the weekends. (You can’t.)
A round of soliciting general folks was beneficial to the tune of thousands, and that helped cover it. But the biggest boost came from the Digitial Library of Amateur Radio Communications (DLARC), a funded group whose mission for a few years has been to gather as much Amateur Radio history as possible. A signficant percentage of the manuals were radio-oriented, DLARC paid for the general scanning, and it all slid over the finish line as a result. Thank you, DLARC.
Do You Have Your Usual Buffet of Random Thoughts?
Always do.
Certainly, the whole of the project was a success, but along the scale of human time and effort, it was difficult. That was a lot of lifting, a lot of driving, a ton of money and a ton of emotional aspects far outweighing what one would expect for piles of paper. Of course, they’re not just piles of paper – they’re entire outlooks of how technology works, how to teach users to do their own maintenance and process to take care of equipment, and they’re evidence as well as celebration of the wonder of engineering. They have value on multiple levels to the contemporary space, and just the graphic design and typography alone could consume a summer.
The largest hold-up was neither will nor the effort – it was money and funding. Yes, you can get a few volunteers to do work, and if there was some sort of golden fifty manuals that everyone absolutely needed online, those could have been done – but doing hundreds of thousands of scanning of pages in an orderly, tracked and quality-assured methodology just takes funding. There’s an entire discussion in whether any volunteer effort should be used at all, and I can assure you that I did get contacted by or was shown individuals in the professional space who believed it better that the manuals go into a trash compactor than any volunteer labor be used, but that’s how it always is in life regarding what resources go where. If money had not been the object, this whole thing would have been done in months.
For when people inevitably say they were sure a different manual was available and it wasn’t HP or Tektronix and yet it appears not to be scanned, that means it was sold off before my team arrived, or it was lost before we arrived, or it was in some way basically jammed somewhere strange. Those volunteers were brutally intense going through that warehouse. The warehouse shots look bigger because there were sometimes a dozen copies per unique manual.
Everything else I ever wanted to say was in those dozen entries listed above, so if you want to settle back and enjoy those, go for it.
Also, I wish to shout out the heroic efforts of the Bitsavers Project, a completely-separate-from-me entirely independent effort to scan manuals, digital artifacts and more. They’ve done so much more, for so longer, and so consistently.
What’s Left?
These manuals have very basic metadata. If people see a manual needs more description, or better description, or they want to just note bad entries and so on, leave a review under the item and I’ll integrate it in. You can always do a full-text search across the manuals and you’ll see text you’re looking for (it’s the “search text contents” option under the collection search). All are welcome to contribute that as it strikes them.
In Which My Situation is Discussed. — December 23, 2025
Sometimes I think about the person who had apparently binge-watched a pile of my presentations, looked at a couple that had been more recent, and announced that while they loved my work, it was a sad thing to consider how I was slowing down – how my energy wasn’t reflected like it used to be, specifically citing a presentation I gave in Europe as proof. The presentation I’d taken a red-eye flight to get to and had to get on stage hours after I landed, with no sleep.
There’s a wide gap, in many facets, of the presentation of myself that I put online and the life I live and have lived day to day. My hope is the most interesting aspects are seen by a public that enjoys my company, and not seen by people who find me a grating somnambulance in an online life they’re just trying to get by in.
But regardless, mythology continues to rule the day.
At some point in the green days of Twitter as the world’s chatroom, I was mentioned and, because my handle found its way into searches, a collection of people I’d blocked over years discovered they all shared this trait. They began talking amongst themselves, trying to discern why I’d done such a drastic thing. While they never quite stumbled onto the beach of the actual obvious reasons I had, they did in fact swim about and cook up a fascinating answer: I was beginning to develop a mental breakdown and possibly one of the degenerative brain diseases, and in doing so my personality had changed, and I wasn’t there anymore. This conclusion worked gangbusters for me, because then the trash takes itself out. I’ve got Hackerzeimers. Go with that.
It’s not difficult to get relatively known for something, if you do it a lot, and talk about it. If you’re both lucky and persistent, it might grow to something beyond that. It is odd for an outsider cataloguer and enraged librarian to gain anything resembling a following of sizeable mass, and if the fan mail is any indication, a warm spotlight of affection as I drift in and out of peoples’ awareness. I’ve been lucky or damned.
All this to say that, while I’ve certainly benefitted from an elevated profile for what would otherwise be a series of simple and repetitive vocations and hobbies, the road to glory has not been devoid of bumps and bruises. Most of these have been minor, a few clearly not. As my records show I’ve written essays on this weblog less than a dozen times in the last few years, whereas I once tried doing them nearly daily and at least weekly, and the result is that for some people, devoid of knowlege of me personally, might assume my star has fallen or I’m lying on my side on a day bed asking the staff to play my greatest hits on a screen nearby.
This, fundamentally, is a direct cause of how exactly people are keeping tabs on me. I can assure everyone of several basic facts, some of which I can expand on, but which might stretch the level of your interest in knowing:
- I continue to be extremely healthy in a cardiac way – my prescription regimen and no longer having a propensity to make tuna melts an unveering pillar in my diet, along with generally seeing doctors at the beginning instead of towards the end of a condition, have kept me quite fine.
- I do a podcast episode every single week and I’m officially at 350 episodes. The Patreon is where you will hear them and I eventually get around to syndicating them to the general public; but the Patreon gets them first. By a rough back-of-calculator-app estimation, I have nearly 3 full days of audio of me talking about myself, issues and the general state of the past and current world.
- Early next year I will celebrate 15 years at the Internet Archive, making it my longest single run of employment. I do not truly have a saying in the matter but I would not mind a world where it was my last job altogether. I read this article and I am inspired.
- I have been to a sizeable amount of locations both domestic and international and I’ve attended hundreds of movies, concerts and events, preventing any sort of regretful wail from where Montressor has chained me.
- This past year, I acquired a persistent stalker, harmless but ambiently entertaining, and, in a plot twist, an entirely different person attempted to get multiple family members and myself killed. They were, ultimately, unsuccessful.
In short, there’s nothing too much to worry about.
The rest of this entry is neither announcement nor attack. It’s mostly me talking about a really wonderful outcome in terms of working space, and the financial lean it’s causing.
Some time ago, I cleaved my spaces in twain. I continued to live in a series of apartments, but the part of me that desires sleep, meals and a pleasant desktop machine and doesn’t want to be surrounded by the detrius of a thousand conversations would keep said apartment – but the part of me that does want to be the Willy Wonka of Crap began renting a small office.
And I do mean small – 90 square feet, although with some camera trickery I could make it seem like more. Photos from this space range from sadly quiet to artistically fun.
It was exactly what I needed. Near my apartment (a walk, really). Confined only to the worlds of digitization, livestreaming at loud volumes, and getting on with it as regards my archive work. And, relatively, it was inexpensive.
That said, inexpensive is not zero expense, and I was lucky enough to be subsidized by a number of people, most notably the awesome FaxZero company. Between all of this, my costs were notable but quite under control. A lot of work was done in this office – thousands of items digitized, thousands of mails answered, interviews and presentations conducted.
Over time, the management company behind this small office, who also provided a meeting room set (which I only used twice) and appliances (which I wandered out to occasionally) would raise the rent here and there. Still – in general, I felt very safe, especially what with the threats and the occasional demands to meet me in person to Settle Things. I could walk in past a security guard setup, go up a few floors, and go into my favorite type of world – a windowless room. It turns out I really like working inside a dark box, and while more expensive offices provided windows and outward facing doors, my love of a tiny alcove with minimal light worked out for me – for a few years.
As is often the case, this management company raised its rent, usually a small amount, occasionally a leap, until the cost they were charging for my little box was past $100 a square foot. I had to decline a renewal of the lease, and move onwards.
As is also often the case, this seeming upheaval instead provided a truly wonderful opportunity.
Casting around for a new place to rent, I decided to go for it and just pursue industrial listings and spaces. The differences between this, and, say, simple rooms or professional shared office space deals, is that you can get some absolutely whacky listings: unfinished warehouses, empty storefronts, buildings with strange and unusual tenants and somewhere deep inside, a room with your shingle on the door.
That’s how I found my current space – looking for unfinished warehouse space with the rough plan of pitching an industrial canvas tent inside and having my materials inside like a warped meth lab, I instead took a really engaging tour with an absolutely charming and fair-dealing landlord. We looked at more reasonable options and came to terms almost immediately.
Here is what comes of not settling and taking a leap into the unknown.
I hope it’s obvious what a truly revolutionary situation this is for me. The reason there’s so much more in this room is because I was able to 100% clear out every single paid-for storage unit and home-based pile of anything related to my archiving and digitizing work. It’s all in one room. That alone is a major relief.
It’s lit like a nightclub because I like indirect colored lights, and I can go wild in there.
And within this location, I livestream my archiving/working days, go through long-dormant promises and plans, and have been aggressively digitizing or disposing of “what next” items I’ve had with me forever.
Dozens of boxes have left this room. Every photo, including the one above, is out of date within a few days of taking it, as items are processed, repackaged, cleared out, and sent away.
It is, in many ways, a culmination, a heavenly moment, a true beloved space.
This should be the end of it, of course – just a note that I’ve moved, like a basic birthday announcement or a declaration that we made it, folks. I should be spending my hours a day digitizing and getting materials up by the terabyte to the Internet Archive and other destinations, moving this backlog out at the major speeds I’m currently achieving.
But.
After the initial year, my rent went up for Bank Reasons. My landlord walked me through the entire financial reason, including an anchor tenant moving elsewhere, and an audit by the financial instituion that is co-owner of the property, and my rent now stands for the next few years at $1000 a month.
I have a solid income. I absolutely can continue to pay this unabated and will do so.
But over time, various folks have thrown me funds to help with this burden (as well as costs of hosting, and other aspects of what I suppose constitutes my public life). There have been months I’ve borne the whole cost of these various recurrent debts, and months I’ve not paid anything. The uncertainty is beginning to have a toll.
So I’ll say:
There are a variety of ways to support this space that sends out so much material, ranging from sponsorship of the livestream, sending money to me via the paypal or venmo services, or signing up for the Patreon. If you have means and wish to help contribute towards that, it would be very welcome. My e-mail and other points of contact are open.
Otherwise, and I seriously have to stress this:
Nothing will change. If you’ve given me funds and support in the past, nothing is going behind a new paywall (and I thank you profusely for that past help). Nothing is going to be stopped, nothing is going to end. I’ll continue what I’m doing to cobble together the budget, and it inspires me every day I go to the office to make the absolute most of that space and use the equipment and tools within it to work at the top speed I can.
It’s been a wild ride to get here, and it will continue. See you on the stream.
I No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals. (But You Probably Should.) — July 29, 2025
I attended INIT HELLO over the past weekend, and had a very good time. Located near Baltimore and spanning 2 days, the event was an Apple II themed potluck and contained about 50 people using said machines, doing workshops and giving a smattering of presentations. I ran the streaming/recording machine and even got a chance to give a little speech at the end. An excellent repast all around.
Why INIT HELLO even happened is a subject for another time. Today’s subject is also not specifically about the building where it was held, but now’s a good time as any to tell you about it if you’ve never heard of System Source.
System Source is a business sort of business that handles training and IT and does all that office sort of stuff, but it also contains a computer museum, which itself is composed of multiple other museums. It’s like a fun museum turducken.
INIT HELLO was organized rather quickly, months to be specific, and it’s a miracle it all came together so well. This was, in part, not only the effort of the organizers, the folks who dropped some cash to float the costs, and a lot of volunteer labor throwing in – it’s also because the owner of System Source opened doors for an odd, unproven, lumpy event to take place.
That kindness led to a fun little conversation at some point when it turned out the owner of System Source was also on the board of the Vintage Computer Festival, which I’d written about semi-recently.
He and I chatted a little about this and that related to the VCF organization, my interactions with it, and the law of unintended consequences.
Thus, here we are.
While I continue to not attend Vintage Computer Festivals, and my interactions along various lines tells me the inter-organizational structure of the place is prone to misunderstandings and confusion, you shouldn’t punish the attending exhibitors, who do some of the finest work in retrocomputing and have no say or agency in matters beyond their table space.
For many people who harbor love of old machines and concepts, and who are filled with a wish to share their knowledge or collections with a sympathetic and engaged audience, the Vintage Computer Festivals held throughout the United States (and soon Canada) are often their sole opportunity to connect with old (and new) fans of their efforts.
Some of my finest interactions with people who have gone above and beyond to maintain and present technology have happened at VCF-related events – and while I won’t drag them into a sort of paradoxical Jason Scott-attention Devil’s Bargain by mentioning them, I’ll say that I’ve enjoyed their smiles and their conversations. Solid, good people, doing good things: A brimming joy and wonder about these expensive machines converted to toys and educational entertainment about the world they came from.
A good display of computer history doesn’t just happen – it can represent years of careful collecting, precision layout of signs and wiring and explanatory diagrams, and then hauling (at great distance, personal expense, and time) into a waiting empty space at various venues. VCF is not the only place that offers this, of course; but even as one of a fabric of opportunities, it is a not insignificant percentage of the chances these exhibitors have in a given year to meet future fans and collaborators.
I_nterpersonal conflict is my personal candy_, and while it’s a delightful jaunt when the gears turn just so and a truly well-crafted flaming arrow can be directed into unsuspecting machinery, I’ve been led to believe that my essays far exceeded their mark and have caused financial distress. Without diving too deep into research for that claim, I’ll simply say that it would truly make me sad to have some of these families and individuals, just trying to show their home-baked technological wares, be left standing in an underattended hallway or chamber hoping for an audience that seems less populated each passing year.
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Bodaciously True and Totally Awesome — March 14, 2025
This first paragraph is a paradox. I want you to go to a funding campaign and click on a button and support a project. But the project is one that expects you to be the kind of person who loves reading. I personally think there might be a slight amount of people who don’t have much time to read but respect the idea of someone making a nine book series and helping them to promote it. For those people, click here. Otherwise, keep reading.
When we want to amuse ourselves, Chris Orcutt and I calculate out how long we’ve been friends, because the number is massive by most standards and it’s one of our little consistencies through our individual, chaotic lives. The number as of this writing is 43 years.
We are no-holds-barred fans of each other, and of our divergent goals and efforts in our paths. The bias is deep-seated and profound, palpable really. If you’re building up a court case against one of us, the other will not join you, and in fact you may find yourself with a spoon in your neck before the proposal gets out of your mouth. We are bonded and we back each other up.
This round, it’s my turn.
After being literally across the street from the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, Chris recalibrated his life and career away from (very good) copywriting for businesses and CEOs, and took his previous years as a journalist, and became a full-time novelist, which was always his dream. He’s been doing it ever since.
And not just doing it – excelling at it. His books have sold very well, and it is possible to grab them immediately. That is, a significant amount of times, he has set off on a book writing project, spent the years doing the drafts, refining, editing, and then publishing it where others can enjoy it. His books exist. The ratings are excellent. The boy can write.
In his 40s, he found himself at a bit of a crossroads.
He’d written some solid mystery novels, a number of anthologies, and more. And while writing is everything from frustrating to solid-state euphoria, and creating books was his heart and soul, he didn’t want to go into the ground having made “a bunch of books”.
He wanted to make something substantial. Something you could have an opinion on, but that opinion couldn’t include the words “slight” or “okay”. A piece of work you had to at least take off your hat for a moment and mutter “mother of god” before either reaching for it, or backing away. An accomplishment.
Ten years later, he’s there.
This is ten years of no nights out, scant visits to family and friends and events, and long walks with Dashiell the Dog in parks and trails working out the endless puzzles of a nine-part novel series.
Nine parts! Nearly two million words! I struggle to give context to this sort of dedication to the project. Chris has estimated he’s spent at least 30,000 hours over the decade writing the novel, but we all know you have to count all the time considering possibilities, discarding approaches, suddenly realizing you’ve been swimming laps but were deep in a scene.
I prefer percentages: Chris has spent 20 percent of his life on this project.
If nothing else, acknowledge the effort. Coming to the end of a project this massive, this involved, this concentrated diamond of goal, stands among very few who set off on such a journey. He fuckin’ did it.
I will refrain from describing the depths Chris went to in making his novel, which takes place in the 1980s, as accurately as possible. But one small overlap with me naturally sticks in my mind:
In the book, his main character Avery Craig writes a letter on his Macintosh. Chris wanted the feel of the keyboard and the experience of a real Mac to guide his words, so he asked me, and I arranged, to have a vintage Mac, carrying case and all, available to use to make it authentic:
I respect the relentless hustle to do right by his project, to take the full walk around, to not guess but research and find out the true and real world he’s bringing together in this monument of printed pages.
Now, like Chris, you stand at a crossroads.
The nine-volume series begins to come out in 2026, with additional books to come out across a timeline. You can close this window and probably hear about the books coming out then, and buy the first one, fall in love with the tale and tell a friend, or just enjoy them however you enjoy your books.
or.
You can help an author of authentic skill, who redirected his laser-like abilities away from churning out noir after romance after adventure tale, who worked on a truly gigantic project, what very well seems to be the first teen epic, properly promote and prepare this series for a proper literary lifespan.
You see, books suffer.
Not from being able to get somewhere after being printed, to sell some copies after being put on shelves or online, to get a bit of an audience after being out there….
…they suffer because they need promotion and support and a hundred little costs to break through the membrane of life’s distractions and cacaphony to gain a foothold in universal awareness.
This novel series is coming out – that’s not a question. It’s done, getting the kind of polish as it goes to printers and gets distributed through various platforms. It’s going to happen. That’s not what Chris and his family and I are asking of you.
We’re asking for people to contribute support to the campaign and efforts to give this book series the respect and treatment it deserves.
The goal is simple: NO CHEAPING OUT.
No using clip art and basic fonts for the covers. No relying on a couple notes here and there to let people know about the project. No avoiding spending money on talented people in the field of promotion and awareness. The plan, evocatively described on their fundraising page, and the result of years of planning, is to put the same sweat equity into the promotion and sale of this project as was put into its creation, year in and year out, up to this point. The plan, taking up a whole wall of a hallway in their home, is to spend five years on this, half of what it took to make the series in the first place.
And to do that, they need funding. People who are looking to drop not just a few bucks expecting a printed series in their mailbox or inbox in a year or so…. but people who go to the page the Orcutts set up, read the pitch and plan, and said “OK, now this is quality.” People who will, impulsively or after great amounts of thought, put serious coin in the Orcutts’ hands with the understanding they are using this money to bring the all-important promotion of this life’s work to the greatest audience they can find.
The Orcutts will be doing this, what they promise on their page. I will personally refund your money if they don’t. That’s how much I believe in them.
They’ve described the whole project in detail. They’ve laid out the plan. They’ve set out all the good silverware and they’re inviting you in to see what they’re going to do. You either will go “well, uh, see you when it’s out” or you understand, from a person who himself has spent years and years on projects, that now is the time to be shockingly generous. Your contribution will have great ramifications for what this series can do to bring attention to what it is.
Just do it. Tell them I sent you.
The Dying Computer Museum — August 19, 2024
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash.
Let’s do a little of both.
The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull hook, and appeal on a day-to-day basis to a relative handful of die-hards.
But in 2011, the Living Computer Museum announced itself with the kind of slick webpage that promised computer history buffs a new wonderland.
There’s a lot to take in with this verbiage, but let’s keep going, for now.
In 2012, the Living Computer Museum opened its actual, physical doors to the public in Seattle. A year later, I visited. It was rather nice. I got a grand and lovely tour by some very polite and friendly people, some of whom I’d known for years. The rooms, well appointed, well-lit, and in the case of the machine rooms, done to a sparkling arrangement, clamored for my attention and approval.
There were computer museums for years, decades before Living Computer Museum, scattered among the United States and the world. I’ve been to many of them – sometimes as an honored guest and backstage VIP, and sometimes just because I hastily read my “find me weirdo geek stuff” Google Maps results and negotiated public transit to walk into the door and walk around like a strutting mayor to see what’s what. In that pantheon, I would put LCM in the realm of “very well appointed, especially the mainframes” but not in the realm of “nobody, ever, has ever tried anything like this”. Just off the top of my head, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has brought not just mainframes and historical computers back from oblivion, but hosted events in which their maintainers and figures have gotten a chance to get their stories on record.
Still, one couldn’t argue with it – the LCM was a solid new outpost in Telling Computer History, and it was on my shortlist of potential homes for materials I might donate in the future. I had a lovely conversation with a member of management about how they maintained functionality and also what their contingencies were for any sort of “endgame” that might befall the endeavor. He assured me they had storage aplenty, in the extremely unlikely event they had to face a closure. Ultimately I didn’t donate my materials there, simply because I found nearer geographic or mission-aligning homes.
My next, and it turns out last, major visit to the Living Computer Museum (outside of a few drive-bys) came in 2018, when I spoke at an event being held there. This gifted me with a chance to see how things had changed in 5 years, and how they had.
Here, then, was something approaching a dream. We had the display cases of technology and the clean carpets and cathedral ceilings of available space, filled not just with computers on desks but entire computer-related environments: classroom, arcade, basement, that showed youngsters what sort of context these computers had lived in. I met Cynde Moya, who had been described to me years earlier as a hard-nosed disciplined caretaker of the materials, and who turned out to be everything they said except hard-nosed – a truly dear overseer of things physical within these walls.
This was April 2018. I lived in the world I live all the time: full of hope, equally full of expectation of doom. But hope was winning.
In October of 2018, Paul Allen was dead.
I suppose everyone has opinions on billionaries, their position in the world, what they represent, and maybe almost everyone has, spoken or unspoken, an awareness that the level of money billions represents disengages you, whether you think so or not, from humanity.
I mean, sure, they cry, laugh, stub their toe, wonder if that’s rain coming, get surprised when the killer’s revealed in a well-done noir thriller. But there’s this cloud of wealth that is ever-present and depending on how it is maintained, or manifested, it slowly bleaches out the edges of living until you realize there is a shocking serenity in their countenance, a noise-cancelling blur that surrounds them, because there are always people whose job is to be aware of them and whose job is to ensure the serenity is maintained.
And there’s the sheer spending power of a billion. I’m sure I could toss out a hundred funny examples of the sheer numerical force of a billion dollars. For example, you could have someone buy a 2025 Subaru Outback, itself the rough amount on the lower end (nationally) of a Domino’s Pizza General Manager’s yearly salary before taxes, and push it into a lake. Taking Christmas and the pusher’s birthday off, to run through a billion dollars of Subaru Outbacks would take you 61 solid years.
But that’s not even very accurate. During that 61 years of pushing Subaru Outbacks into a lake (in Neutral, of course, I’m not a monster), the remaining amount of the money not being spent to purchase lake-bound outbacks would actually be MORE. THAN. A. BILLION. You would actually be richer than you started, if you invested it in even the most brain-dead obvious multi-percent-a-year funds, or left it in any bank. That’s because time and space warp around money.
So do people.
In 2018, after getting cancer in 2009 and 1982, Allen got it again, and this third (public) bout with it ended him, at age 65. His net worth at the time of his demise is the kind that publications who make it their business to will guess at, and the guess sat around $20 billion. Everyone has kind of accepted that, but it’s not really important if it’s $50, $15 or $5 billion. It’s a lot of money.
With his billions, over the decades, Allen owned or partly owned three sports teams, at least 10 companies ranging from airplanes, scientific research, media, and space flight. He owned massive real estate, a movie theater, threw buckets of cash at schools, the arts, and ultimately, a few museums.
To manage it all, he had a company whose purpose was to manage the money, because he wasn’t going to do it himself. The company’s name is Vulcan, Inc. Even after divestment and shutdown after Allen’s death, it has 700 employees. It is one of the largest trusts in the world. It is also now called Vale Group, but I’m going to keep calling it Vulcan.
Vulcan, a company whose job is to manage money and where that goes, is still quite intensely active as an entity, even with Paul Allen’s death. His sister, Jody Allen, chairs the organization she co-founded with her brother in 1986. This company is absolutely gargantuan in its scope and range, and remember, it is a company that just manages a ton of money – that’s the company’s entire purpose.
I wish to take a short moment to not demonize Jody Allen. As the remaining sibling in charge of this company, functionally working through her brother’s holdings, many of which she clearly had no interest or extant position in, and doing so for six years and counting, can’t be anything else than the strangest mixture of pain and endless complication. The $20 billion she’s now in charge of might soften the blow, but likely not by much.
And I apologize for the whiplash here. I’m not overly interested in going down the paths of describing what Jody should be doing, or what her responsibilities are. I am not privy to whatever deep law and lore and functions buried within Vulcan’s iron heart she and her army of people are dealing with, that six years later they are still slowly divesting organizations. I know she has personally called for cullings but I am not informed about the deepest depths of how the aspects of these billions function.
I want to refocus to the fact that Vulcan is divesting itself of the Living Computer Museum.
I want to refocus to the fact that the Living Computer Museum was never a museum.
Look, don’t jump down my throat about this. I’m as shocked as you are.
I didn’t get some inkling from the phone call I had a decade before about potentially donating to Living Computer Museum. I don’t have some spidey-sense about failure or darkness – I just see it everywhere in everything and I treat every day like it’s the one before they find a lump.
If, before it closed, you had made me stand in the center of the LCM and answer whether it was a museum, I’d have happily held up my top hot and shouted “Why yes! One of the finest in all the realms!”
And for all I’d know, it was a museum. There’s no laws on what a thing can call itself regarding being a museum, exhibition, tour, or display. It’s against the law to take money to attend the museum and you get led to an empty lot, sure. But if something has the vestements and affectation of a museum, and you see the big sign saying Museum out front and you go in and there’s displays and staff and events and meetings, you would certainly think it was a museum.
Turns out it wasn’t.
The auction house Christie’s announced it was doing an auction of some of the best portions of Paul Allen’s estate, first with art, and now it would be selling off technology. To fans and studiers of the Living Computer Museum, these items seemed familiar – some of them were on display in the museum.
I found out that some of these to-be-auctioned items would be on display near where I live, so I hopped in my car, parked grandiosely illegally in front of the building, and let myself in.
On display were all sorts of computer history of the “early major days” variety, ranging from a Xerox Star to an Englebart Mouse and even a Pac-Man machine. All had descriptions, all were held out where you could get very near them assuming the guard wasn’t watching too closely, and all of it with a starry-eyed disco-ball aesthetic indicating you were in a space lounge.
So yes, items from the museum were now going to be sold to the highest bidder in a few months. These were some of them, and likely there would be more.
And then, among the relics, I found Stephen Jones.
Stephen Jones and I go a long way back. He was interviewed by me for the BBS Documentary in 2003. So that’s 20 years I’ve known the guy. At our interview session, he showed me his PXL-2000 and his Delorean, both of which I can assure you are high-end geek possessions of the time. And I found his conversation style charming, and his passion for technical subjects perfect for my film.
Stephen’s primary non-profit endeavor, the SDF Public Access UNIX system, was in full swing back then, and is still around now. “Do cool computer things, but don’t try to turn everything into a financial instrument” is not the motto, but it should be. It represents, to me, a lovely ideal of a truly living computer community, incorporating new technology as it expresses itself being something neat, or worth bringing in. Laptop Amish, if you’re stretching around for an anology, which you shouldn’t be. It’s a computer club. And he’s a big part of it.
He was also my initial “in” for the dish on the now-not-so-Living Computer Museum. We’d gone a long way, and here we were, in Christie’s in New York City, standing among offered-for-auction pieces of a gone billionaire’s museum, and maybe we needed to talk in detail, so we did. And I grilled him.
Let’s go back to that initial 2011 announcement page on the Living Computers Museum website, before it was officially an open building.
In the light of its piecemeal disassembly, a lot of this writing hits different. Here’s what I’ve picked up, from Stephen and others, and which I assume for some readers will be new information.
First, this was always intended to be an actual, non-profit, independent/independent-subsidiary museum. It never became that. It is not that. At best, the Living Computer Museum was a billionaire’s (sorry, multi-billionaire’s) collection of computers and technology.
Think of it another way: Jay Leno has a very famous garage that has many wonderful cars and vehicles in it. It is currently, as of this writing, run by a very competent manager named Bernard Juchli, who has been keeping the collection in line for over 20 years. That is, to say, that Leno has a massive collection of cars, competent staff to take care of it, facilities to show them (he has had a number of documentaries and television shows about the garage) and he could probably even open it to the public for an admission price. But you would be hard pressed to call it a “museum” in any sense beyond “it is a display people see videos about”.
As per the request in that 2011 webpage grab, people donated many computers and pieces of history to go into the museum. They expected, no doubt, that they and their children and their childen’s children could stop by displays and point and talk about the family connection to these items.
That was a mirage, a misunderstanding.
This was Paul’s collection of computers, aided by friends and fans. It was always that. The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year, to operate as it was set up, and it never came close to making that amount of income from door sales and t-shirts. It never came close to even figuring out how it would.
It’s perhaps not surprising this misunderstanding could happen, and with what felt like all the time in the world, a mere five years and change of being open to the public might have seemed like a mere revving up for the grand plan of what would come next. But nothing came next. It was a collection you could walk through in a really, really nice display case.
And now it’s time to sell the collection.
Before I end up on a huge rant about what it means to be a museum, let me at least give you some relative good news.
The current rough plan is that the big-ticket items, like this Apple I, will be sold at auction. They’ll make beaucoup bucks, go into private collections or maybe even other institutions, and that’s that for the headliners. But that leaves a lot of other stuff.
SDF has a rough plan to raise funds and digitize software, documentation and other related items that are not part of these big-ticket sales (which will be relatively few) so that unique bits of history that are not headline-grabbing trinkets will, potentially, have a chance at being shared with the public.
And I’ve stepped into it. I’ve offered to take software and documentation and store it at the Internet Archive, and of course to work with SDF on ways to digitize/rip/scan materials and, also, host them at the Internet Archive.
It’s all preliminary, but my card is in the hat. Things are not going to be discarded, if I have anything to do with it. A lot can change, and we’ve already seen expectation vs. outcome with this whole experience, but rest assured, I’ve at least tried to provide one last safety net for the kind of history that easily finds itself gone because nobody steps forward. Internet Archive has stepped forward. Stay tuned to see how that works out.
But you know, what did we learn here? What did we actually come away with in the realm of lessons or teachings about what issues this whole mishegaas has churned up?
I have found, perhaps not to my surprise, that a few people in my orbit are displeased I have punched the dead billionaire, ostensibly about all the good the dead billionaire did. But I wish to point out the dead billionaire did give away all that money and yet still had 20 billion dollars at the end, money that went off and did not do as many nice things as the money given away. So much contributed, tax-free, and yet there’s even more. Perhaps this is not the best place to point out that every billionaire is, in many ways, a failure of society, but maybe we can put a pin in it when we have our first trillionaire, assuming that criticizing a trillionaire is not made illegal at that soonish juncture.
I did have some people say, in not so many words, that of course the Living Computer Museum would collapse once its Master of the House was no longer in charge, and I would take this time to point out that Gordon Bell, co-founder of the Computer History Museum, passed on in May of 2024 and yet the Computer History Museum lives and breathes in his absence. It wasn’t a hard problem.
It’s easy to call me ungrateful, but my ungratefulness comes from the narrative people weave near the power of money, like those myths formed around gods and devils, to explain why things are how they are. I appreciate life and its little whorls and eddies that capture us by surprise and we sink or swim. I do not appreciate acting like someone spending a lot of money on something that slightly amuses them earns them the greatest respect. Especially when, as I do now, I walk among a literal army of people working to clean up the mess left behind, after their march to oblivion.
The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing — May 22, 2024
Imagine, if you will, a vast river.
It flows fast, so fast that when you look away and look back it’s in many ways an entirely different river, not just a slightly different one. It used to be blue with an occasional brown or black. Nowadays, it’s basically brown and black and a signficant amount of it lets off a slow-moving steam that you’re positive causes cancer in 99% of living things. You used to swim in this river, but now you generally don’t, and by “generally don’t” you mean “never”.
Instead your interactions are thus:
You have an occasional cinderblock you wouldn’t feel comfortable throwing in the tiny lagoon you mostly hang out in, or the notably smaller (and cleaner, and calmer) rivers you swim in these days.
So, you walk down to the bank of the river of lost dreams and sulfuric nightmares and throw that cinderblock as far as you can to see what sort of massive splash it causes, and what horrors lurking underneath its surface will temporarily breach to snap and bite and thrash until it goes back to a flowing, nauseating shit-river.
Anyway, that’s how I tweet.
I wrote up this massive framing entry to prepare to write a meaningful weblog entry about what we’re all calling AI but is just “throwing so many GPUs at the problem that our inherent need to find fellow souls in the darkness does the rest”. I call it “Algorithmic Intensity” and started the journey of writing a contextual entry to give my thoughts considering 40 plus years with computers, hype cycles and expectations of technology.
I ended up not doing it, primarily because a lot of the same effort that took writing weblog material and doing presentations is mostly taken up by The Podcast. The amount of paying subscribers has dwindled over the six (!) years it’s been recording, but those folks do help with my medical bills and other costs, so they’re kind of getting the best of me, and definitely the best of my efforts. I mean, don’t worry, I like you too, errant reader from beyond the screen – but those folks keep my office rented, my doctors’ visits stress-from-bills-free and allow me not play Old Yeller with my domains.
This balancing act, of doing free and by some definitions altruistic sharing of information with the nitty gritty costs of material goods and services and vendors is the absolute classic conundrum, and lies at the heart of many an Internet Presence. One of my credoes when I’m talking to people who want to do some sort of endeavor is that Every Person Is At Least Five People when it regards to ongoing concerns that produce work on a persistent basis. Someone blasting out an epic every half-decade or so aside, if you find a “person” doing “a lot”, the chances are that that person has other people, friends or collaborators or employees, who are doing some of the lifting. To consider those people lone wolves is usually a fallacy, and therefore there are somewhat-hidden costs or measures of contribution that are leading to the thing you just … get to have.
I’ll save some comments on AI for the end. Let’s get to why I’m writing this at all.
The cinderblock I threw into the Twitter crap-stream was a comment that Google had made yet another user interface/experience shift, and in my opinion, this took a number of skirmishes the company has been waging against the idea of the world wide web and moved, intentionally or not, into outright war.
The actual content of the thread is sort of irrelevant to me; but just to satisfy curiousity, I was essentially indicating this: Google forcing, by default, to a majority of users over time to see a generated summary of the output of the aggregate browsed sets of material out on the internet, especially at the low-quality they’re doing it, is a fundamental shift in the implied social contract that allowed search engines to gain the utility they have. I did it in a handful of crappy tweets and was literally in between some Gyoza and my Sushi lunch and when I noticed sometime later that I was getting tons of notifications (I don’t have twitter as a client on my phone anymore, so I didn’t get buzzing or beeps or anything) and when I ran the analytics that the account has, the numbers were fucking ridiculous:
“My child has been kidnapped; if you see a grey Toyota with red stripes, call the police” deserves those kinds of numbers. So does “I, person responsible for ten years for this beloved product or franchise, was just summarily fired for unknown reasons”.
“I think Google made a boo-boo” absolutely does not.
But justice doesn’t exist for this sort of lottery, and I watched the flaming pyre of attention gain millions of (partial) humans and tens of thousands of “Engagements”, and I have a general rule about all this.
All this to say that once we’re up to this level of froth, whatever’s coming out of it has the stretched-almost-transparent feel of an already flimsy nylon sock over a 55-gallon drum of toxic waste. Twitter used to be amusingly knockabout in the variance of Opinion Tourists who would stop by for a quick hit; now it’s just a series of either “didn’t read” or “I am stopping by because the only way I feel anymore is the resistance from sticking a blade against your rib cage”.
On my cold read of the actual responses with actual words, they are best summarized as:
- You say AI-generated summaries are a step too far from Google. I do not like previous Google steps.
- It’s actually all great and you are old. (Someone called me a Boomer, but heaven’s sakes, I’m Gen X)
- Everything is terrible and this is terrible and you are terrible
- Herp Derp Dorp Duh (Rough translation)
Let’s waste the time with what I was bringing up, in a slightly cogent fashion:
For sure, Google has both innovated some amazing accesses to realms of information (Maps) and often provided a (usually bought from someone else) product that many might find useful (Mail) and has done services which take advantage of their well-funded technology to provide a nominal benefit to the world (the 8.8.8.8 DNS server). They’ve also, in their quest to make the web “better”, leveraged their near-monopoly on browser engines and search engines to create “programs” and “policies” that are little more than “make it better for Google” (AMP comes to mind, there’s many more).
Google’s constantly manipulation of web standards to suit their needs does not make them special; they’re just the assholes with a hand on the steering wheel for now. And like previous holders of this title, they’ve poisoned, cajoled, forced, ignored and ripped their way through standards, potential competitors and independent voices and figures along the way.
Picking out any specific sin (or “hustle”, as shallow techbros like to call it) is usually a Sisyphean task, but in the actual thing I was referring to in my tweet cinderblock, it was a program that Google implemented where an AI “summary” is showing up in a growing set of mobile and desktop instances (customers), completely choking off anything one might point to. I called this a declared war against the web. It is not the only war. It is not only warfare against the web. Picking it apart reveals chains linking to a thousand points of contention. I’d hoped to avoid AI discussion for some time but here we go.
I have lived through a variety of “revolutions” and hype cycles of said revolutions, and the fallout and resultant traces of same. I did a documentary about one. I enjoyed living through the others, although with time it’s been a case that I was often not old enough or given enough perspective to truly look down the sights of what was going on and derive a proper horror/entertainment from the various ups and downs.
And now, one version of a type of software that has been around for a long time is suddenly on everyone’s minds. It’s being used to make a variety of toys. A number of people are hooking those toys up to heart machines and bombs. And I’m fifty years old and I get to watch it all with a pleasant cola in my hand.
I’m profoundly cynical but I’m not generally apocalyptic. For me, what’s being called “Artificial Intelligence” and all the more reasonable non-anthropomorphizing terms is just a new nutty set of batch scripts, except this time folks are actually praying to them. That’s high comedy.
Also, my eyelids are growing heavy and I literally have to caffienate myself to keep talking about it. Fundamentally, there’s as much excitement for me in the “potential” of everything AI as there was for double-sided floppies, sub-$500 flatscreen televisions, console emulators, USB sticks, MiniDV cameras, and discount airflight. All of them enact change. All of them are logical innovation. All of them stayed, morphed, went. At no point in any of them did I have apoplexy or spiraling mental breakdowns. Life went on.
Regarding of “something should be done”, the point of my original planned weblog entry was to refer to the Aboveground as something some AI companies were doing – straddling that balance of “we are too new to be regulated or guided” and “it’s too late, we’re basically ungovernable”. My attitude is that Algorithmic Intensity should be punched in the crib, given a solid going over. I had a conversation with one AI person that “farm to table” tracing of the source material being trained on would be a must and that companies should be devising ways to provide that information. He said it was impossible. It is not impossible.
When I mess with this stuff (and I have accounts on a bunch of these services, that I mess around with), I have a fantastic time. I am doing all sorts of experiments and try-outs of the tech to see if it has uses for what I deal in, which is scads of information. My response continues to be, as it always has for something new, that setting the old stuff on fire to “force innovation” is a sign you are a world-class huckleberry. The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. What a lovely tell. In my middle age, being able to have something go “beep” when a time-wasting numbnut has entered the chat is a golden algorithm, and the speed at which companies and individuals have been willing to throw everything out, reputation-wise, is a glorious moment.
Which brings me, again, to this specific Google situation.
There’s just no way the high-fructose syrup of the kind of answers these “smart agent” responses are giving in search engines will last. A number of people on Twitter told me that if a site could be summarized in 200 characters by this, they never deserved to exist anyway. Problem is, the 200 characters are NOT summarizing the site. It’s not even often good! It might get “better” but ultimately companies like this do not have the ability or skill to generate new creations or do helpful works – they can only remix and re-offer, buying out the same collections or licensing access. And if those terms are not good, they’re going to lose a lot of money buying back trust.
I don’t like writing about non-timeless things, but we are in a phase right now and that phase is both fleeting and extraordinarily entertaining to me. As I said to a friend recently,
“We get to be 50 and watching this all go down! Front row seats!”
How this all shakes out, what parts stick around and what snaps in half, is for luck and spite and challenge and response to decide. If the best people always won, our world would look and feel a lot different. But while the fireworks and trumpet blasts echo through the landscape, I’ll save a seat for you.
A Never-Ending Block Party — April 21, 2024
Kerfuffles are Kerfuffles. Causing one recently, with its particularly low-stakes aspects (what’s done is done, no actions appear to be planned, I’m already doing things differently, etc.) allowed me to at least re-visit a policy I’ve been somewhat silently instituting for years.
I block. I block frequently, quickly, and across every single medium that consitutes “communication” in the contemporary era.
I’ve been doing it for well over a decade, but somewhere after my heart attack I upped the frequency and dropped the level at which the “block” action gets enacted. It is very, very easy to find yourself unable to directly communicate with me via the method I blocked you.
Why anyone would possibly care that I do this (beyond the people I block) is not entirely my responsibility, but I think there’s a point, so let’s keep going.
First, I’m rather easy to find and communicate with. I have many channels of ingress, from phone numbers and e-mails to social media and streaming. I do this mostly because I’m trying to be there when people have materials to donate to Internet Archive, or if they’re in distress and need to reach out to someone. Both these situations happen more than one might think. I appreciate both when they do, and do my best under the circumstances.
But the downside is that people can reach me very easily and all your instincts that there are spectacular counts of truly damaged individuals who have effortlessly acquired internet access and spray their damage around the world like some urine-filled lawn sprinker are, as I can personally attest, correct.
At some point, depending on how far back you have persisted online, there was this unspoken contract that you gave someone multiple bites of the apple to show how awful they were, under the theory that the first interaction was an inadvertently bad impression. That contract is no longer in effect. That’s a large contingency of folks gone; the masters of showing up in the middle of a conversation or communication, unbidden and unwanted, and dropping absolute bile into the stream. One strike and they’re out.
Occasionally, I even pre-block. I block people who, when I see them interacting with others, I have no overly powerful urge to envision ever being a part of their online lives. I suppose there’s some fundamental Fear of Missing Out that could be ginned up regarding them, that they might end up saying or doing something that I should know about, but I’ll let others tell me. There are a non-zero amount of times I’ve seen people say “Foobatz69 has a point” and I go look them up and I’ve blocked Foobatz69. Maybe I’ll peek in. I probably won’t.
Less obviously, it goes the other way too. In a notable amount of situations, I’ve blocked people because I recognize that I’m going to be the problem, that what I do and how I approach things are exactly the sort of activity that makes a given person or account go ballistic or switch to attack mode, so I save us both the trouble. I occasionally hear they’re confused. I do not seek to explain why. They continue to live a normal and happy life, and I continue along with mine.
So, why bring this all up?
Well, first, occasional this-and-that publicity has provided me with the ability to see discussions about myself in which a small number of blocked folks commiserated about the whole “Jason blocked me” situation and of course many have taken the Imagination Express to Injustice Town to describe a situation where I could possibly have come to the decision to block, and the general consensus will be some variation of a degredation of my mental health.
It’s quite the opposite. My mental health has never been better.
Outside of absolute buzzbomb cornhusks dropping corossive misery at every opportunity, there were a range of folks who I truly admired and respected who, upon my looking back retrospectively at our interactions across years, totally lacked warmth and friendliness from their position. Literally every response a vicious insult and somehow, I’d considered this a pleasant and comfortable dish to be served down the front of my tuxedo on common occasions. Their blockage is literally medication, a salve, an ointment. I’m free of my delusion that they are friends.
And again, there are folks who, I find, are going to be nothing but negative energy in my life, at a time when I am growing older and don’t see much need to throw my body and life into a deep dark well of irrelevant free-floating rage, never to be recovered or rewarded.
And you know? On at least a half-dozen occasions, which is more than any reasonable person should experience, I’ve had individuals who, upon being blocked and clearly indicated their presence and communication were unwelcome, proceed to track down and find every single communication channel still open to them and begin upping the energetic demands I explain myself. I’m talking chat systems, phone calls, e-mails from various addresses, and asking friends of mine who might still have contact with me to “put in a word” to “set the record straight”. In other words, I have entirely too many examples where people I had a bad feeling about have gone absolute full stalker mode, in a way that they would never imagine themselves as such, but absolutely are. On two of those six occasions, it happened physically.
None of those half-dozen are being unblocked. That was not the solution to the percieved issue.
I’m sharing this not for some sort of support plea, or to indicate I have a hard life. I have the mathematical opposite of a hard life.
I’m sharing it on the off-chance that someone reads this, realizes their relationship with someone or someones online is actually a massive negative energy drain, or rife with abuse, or simply a case of not realizing you’ve left a pathway to lightweight harassment that can do nothing but increase. If that’s the case, trust me. Block, block, block. Report and block. Mute and block. You will feel parts of your soul unclench that you didn’t previously understand were balled into tights fist of stress and simmering disaster. I’m involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of interactions in a given week, and I do it. You should consider this your license to do it as well.
If this helps two people, it was worth it to discuss. And it’s already helped one, and that one is me.
I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals — April 12, 2024
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the situation or the context, I figured it was worth writing a few quick addendums.
Naturally, as is the case when you post anything anywhere in public, I am called a liar. I’ll simply say that everything I describe in the blog entry happened. I contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they kept the bins. I am fine with people claiming that disposal was not what happened, but this is what I was told, directly, in human words. The fact that I am seeing contradictory and confusing descriptions of what happened is not a checkmark destined for the Win column.
A few people have rushed to indicate that I need to be more careful describing “which” VCF entity is at fault. I am sad to report to them all that the Byzantine VCF structure of name licensing, geographic branding, and internal corporate entity is meaningless to anyone six inches away. You all know each other and you all interchangeably use nomenclature. If you are part of an organization that calls itself some form of “VCF” and need an opportunity to write a statement about how your organization in a solitary/separate entity and should be considered more worthy or ethical than others, feel absolutely free.
A small sliver of people were concerned I was saying that I was never going to go to any computer history conference or event again. I am a free person with the freedom to attend whatever is open to the public. As it stood, however, VCF East was the easiest event for me to attend, so it was where I saw people the most. A minor point is that I considered attendance a form of endorsement, but that is my own personal choice. The chances of me attending other events is, like death by cow, low but never zero.
The rest of the discussions I have seen from the blog entry, raging in the usual stages of social media and posting forums, have failed to require any further response or thought from me personally.
Finally, this is all relatively minor in terms of the work I do and projects I focus on, an event that brought me some fury but which has mostly played the part of filed under “life lessons”. I just got tired of having quiet inward emotion when I was reminded of the event, specifically when VCF announcements would pass by my screen, followed by nice folks asking if they would be seeing me at the event. Now I have made a statement, and rather than the beginning of a saga, I consider it the end of one. My conversations with people and organizations I shift materials to are much longer, much more involved, and with much more contingencies as a result of this event, and things are better for it.
I Am No Longer Attending Vintage Computer Festivals — April 11, 2024
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right.
Years ago, clearing out the Information Cube, I donated its contents to roughly 10 organizations, carefully splitting things up for the best home, as I’d been entrusted with these materials by many great folks who believed I’d make the right choices. Videogames went to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, books and many printed materials to the Internet Archive, piles of game-related magazines went to the Strong Museum of Play, multiple sets of Wired magazine went to a scanning group, and so on. This was a shipping container worth of material, so we are talking dozens and dozens of crates, received by trustworthy and great folks across the entire country.
Among these donations were a set of publications, mostly IEEE-related but with a few other sets of titles, to the Vintage Computer Federation, based in New Jersey. The donation was roughly this:
To make this donation, I paid for the containers, filled them, put many issues in bags, and then rented a truck to drive them the roughly 70 miles to the VCF headquarters in Wall, NJ. There I dropped them off and went home. This was roughly 2017.
A number of years later, I contacted the Vintage Computer Federation to ask how the magazines were doing, if they were part of a project, or if I needed to transfer them elsewhere.
I was told they tossed them out. Every one.
However, I was told, they had decided to keep the plastic boxes, and were making use of them.
As a result, I’ll state clearly: I have no intention of attending the Vintage Computer Festival or doing any sort of interaction with the VCF team again.
I’m mentioning this because I went to so many of the festivals, I know people would be expecting me to go, and I get mail every year looking forward to my attendance. I have indicated I would not be there, but not totally explained why. Now I have. I consider attendance to be an endorsement of this action, and I am fundamentally uninterested in whatever clumped-together set of words they might consider an apology. The concern is dead to me.
I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before. Evan has always been a steel beam of dependable honesty and directness in all the years I’ve known him, which is bordering on decades at this point.
There’s not much else to say. Go if you want, but I won’t be there. Hopefully I will see some of the nice folks I know from the event in other contexts. Otherwise, it has been quite real, and they’re memories I won’t trash for their containers.
In Realtime: Digital Heaven (And a Call for Donations) — February 2, 2024
Imagine an epic of nine years having a happy ending.
I’ve written so much about what is now called the Manuals Plus Collection. Let’s go find those:
- In Realtime: Saving 25,000 Manuals
- In Realtime: Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
- In Realtime: It Is Almost Halfway Done
- In Realtime: Day 2 Felt Like Week 4
- In Realtime: It Is Done
- A Small Dark Detour
- In Realtime: Post-Mortem
- A Little Bit of the Manuals
If you don’t want to walk those, I’ll make it simple: I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, numbering something like 50,000-60,000 manuals. (A rough estimate.)
Then they were stored in a storage unit. Then they were stored in a closed coffee house. Then they were transported to California. Then they were stored until last year, 2023.
Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort out a few pallets of the manuals for products related to the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are beginning to show up in this collection:
Like, it’s happening! It’s happening. It’s happening!
Like anything else open at Internet Archive, you can search the text contents (which are being automatically OCR-ed). You can download the original unformatted jp2 files in a zip. You can download a PDF generated from the jp2 files. You can read it online.
Either this is the first time you’ve heard of all this going on, or you’ve known about it and wondered whatever happened to that mass of manuals.
They’ve been kept in safekeeping, awaiting their moment. We reboxed them, and in fact, transporting them from MD to CA was the last major project I did before my heart attack. It might have been the last thing I ever did for the Archive! That would have been a pretty good way to go out.
But here, in 2024, the final stretch is going on.
And now, the pitch.
The group doing the digitizing does lots of digitizing for the Internet Archive. They are well-paid and legitimate professional contractors who are sent the items, and who do careful scanning to the best of the materials’ ability to provide access to the information, and then do quality checks, and then upload them. When they’re humming, they’re processing a pallet every couple of weeks (with lots of mitigating factors). They’re going to get through the four pallets sent to them from the DLARC sorting very quickly, in other words.
I’ve negotiated a situation where, if money is sent in, the remaining pallets that should be scanned can just be sent along without sorting them for DLARC funds, DLARC will fund any that happen to overlap with their mission, and the rest will just be done.
That’s if money is sent in.
How much money? We’re still working that number out. It’s going to be somewhere in the range of tens of thousands of dollars. So I’m looking for both big-ticket supporters (who can mail me at jason@textfiles.com) or individuals. In all cases, you’re just going to donate to the Internet Archive itself, which is at https://archive.org/donate and your donations are tax-deductible. Telling them you’re donating to support this project will help keep the project funded. (There’s a way to leave a comment, and if not, send me a note you did it and how much).
We’ve already sorted these things into pallets, and we know a subset of these (HP and Tektronix) are scanned elsewhere and don’t need to be specifically done this way. This leaves just the historically vital and informationally wonderful manuals dating from the 1940s through the 2000s. As they’re popping up, each one is a gift.
If we make less than we need to scan them all, then we’ll only scan up to where it’s paid for. I believe we can close it out, but if the interest/money isn’t there, then it isn’t there – fair enough. Browse the collection as it grows into thousands of manuals as it is and consider if you want to be part of all that. That’s definitely happening.
But what a happy ending it would be to push all these manuals through the process, and close it up. That’s why I’m popping up to talk about it, and why I hope you would consider contributing towards it, for a non-profit that deserves your support generally.
Meanwhile: It’s happening! It’s happening. It’s happening!!