This reply hanging off a thread about prior art is telling.

As surprising as it may be, the past can tell a lot about the future, as the past was present at a point, and the future is now.

Take an example about AI. This past couple of years isn't the first time that AI had been a hot topic. Look back to the late 80's -- there was a lot of research into it and lots of predictions about how the world would change -- but that didn't happen. It definitely didn't affect the general public as has today. So why is that? Looking at the different circumstances between the past and today (i.e., increase in computing power, availability of networks and broadband, general availability of computing devices, etc. etc.) could then be used to predict the future.

Looking back at the past can give hints about what the future may hold.

waves in the general direction of all the millions of books about history and all the history classes we've had in school and all the people studying history and all the history channels on YouTube or TikTok or all the history subreddits

What does that even mean? Our history is important to us. Full stop.

since I wrote that: it's actually pretty rare that a defendant can actually use a piece of prior art in a case, but there's always a hope that ONE time, you will.

The other difficulty is that lawyers and jurors will make fun of anything that's too old. I know, it isn't fair, but you do have to overcome a built-in bias against ancient stuff.

I realize you're not talking about litigation, but that was what I meant.

Disregarding the past is simply ignorance.

He also mentions that the person who originally accepted the donation was pushed out of the VCF organization, and did not have a say in the material being disposed of.

There is a possibility here that the containers sat for years after they were accepted, no one was left who knew why they contained a bunch of papers, and so they thought it wouldn't be a big problem if they disposed of the papers. Being a supposedly archival organization, however, if this was the case it would have been very poor judgememt.

I'm the kind of person who keeps random marketing materials from obscure gadgets from 40 years ago, so I can feel the pain of these documents having been lost.

That being said, once a donation is made, in general, is there an obligation to uphold any wishes of the donator? I guess there is, in many circumstances.

You can argue that the giving of a gift is a final act, that the gifted item belongs to the recipient now, and that since you're morally free to do whatever you want with what belongs to you, you are free to do with the gift as you please, including tossing it out.

But gifting is imbued with meaning beyond the mere transfer of ownership. This is obviously true in the case of gifts between people: tossing out a sweater hand-knit for you by your grandma is at the very least an asshole move, and I would argue that it's just wrong because it would cause her pain to know that. The sweater has meaning beyond being a mere sweater; particularly so because of the care with which it was made. A collection like the one we're discussing was likely accumulated with care, it held meaning beyond the economical value of the magazines or journals that constituted it.

Some donations (especially monetary?) are made with not so much care that it matters; but an extensive collection of magazines, by a person invested in the community, to an organization that is supposed to archive (and continue a legacy of looking after old stuff), to me fits in the same ethical landscape of the sweater gift - even if the receiving party is an organization rather than an individual, even if it's a "donation" rather than a "gift". I think we usually displace ethical agency away from organizations, especially for-profit companies, but they should be held accountable for their actions towards the community they supposedly serve (or service). A duty to not be assholes was violated.

Gifts/donations can be conditional, subject to conditions. If someone donates $1 million to a university to fund scholarships for disadvantaged students, and the university instead decides to spend it all on first class air travel for university executives, that would in many jurisdictions be illegal (a breach of trust).

If someone donates an item to a museum, I would say the museum has at least a moral obligation to contact the donor and ask them if they want to take it back before throwing it out.

At one point in time there was problems with the storage space that VCF has. I believe it was fixed. VCF is not a wealthy organization, and is hosted by another underfunded organization. Needs capital to renovate for expansion but it's slow going.

The full stupidity of this is only clear when you realise that almost everything that is considered "technology" today was invented between the 1950s and 1970s. Most of what is invented today is about refinement and scaling of ideas that were developed many decades ago.

You can't built tomorrow if you don't understand and appreciate yesterday.

Without knowing the past you can and will be taken for a ride by any con man selling you old bullshit as fancy new stuff of tomorrow.

Without knowing the past they can and will sell you crappy stupid stuff which you'll gulp down just because its new and shiny, because you don't know that better stuff already existed.

If someone is not passionate about the history and development of their field, I seriously doubt they're a good fit for it.

Those who ignore the past waste a lot of time re-inventing the already invented.

One doesn't have a tomorrow without a yesterday.

The machine that defined our era, and did it so quickly that we realized what was happening and actually had a chance to interview some of the people who kicked it off, and a few of those folks are still alive.

Would you close every museum? What about a museum of old steam engines? Is there a line, or do you simply not see any value in history?

Sure, no need to study history. Just pull to refresh every second and don't remember anything. And also, defund the national archives too, they are apparently useless.

/s

We are now operating in an environment where the average programmer is writing using frameworks on top of frameworks, on top of libraries, on top of SDKs, on top of containers, on top of VMs, on top of OSs, on top of hypervisors, on top of kernels, on top of microcode, and that's collapsing a bunch of the layers.

To have any hope of explaining to the next generation how many of the truly beautiful and fun aspects of computing systems operate, you need to strip away many of these layers.

A great way to do that is with old systems where the layers didn't exist.

"<Sigh>if you only knew." - Guy who did his capstone project on neural networks and computer vision in the 80s.

If you use a CLI - you need to go back to at least teletypes.

Not everyone needs to be concerned with this, but the historical examples of cultures that have throw away their history don't look too encouraging.