On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, John Foust wrote:
> On the other hand, to play the devil's advocate, shouldn't
> there be some set of criteria to help judge what to save,
> and what to ignore? How does it serve the purpose of either
> a learning lab or museum to save *everything*? Isn't some
> software or hardware more valuable than others?
There are different levels to consider. Is it important technically?
Historically? Culturally? Aesthetically?
This is why I make it a practice to preserve whatever I can, from hardware
and software to books and magazines to t-shirts and other ephemera. All
of it is significant on some level to someone, and all of it is
significant in terms of historical record.
I'll bet some archaeologists wished they had a handful of Egyptian poop to
study these days. While I'm not going to go around collecting stool
samples from the various computing pioneers that are still among us, the
point is you never know what is going to be significant for study 10, 100,
1000, 10,000 years from now, so I save everything I can.
We can't predict what artifacts will be "more valuable" because we are
seeing them in our own narrow scope of time. It's best to err on the side
of caution and save everything, if you have the room (and the
perserverance) for it.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
Received on Mon Mar 05 2001 - 10:16:07 GMT