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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the donation was unsolicited, Jason just expected the thousand pounds of tree pulp to be appreciated by a vintage computer festival?

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I don't think your assumption is correct based on this sentence: "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."

Emphasis mine.

From X it seems that the donation wasn't unsolicited, they were basically accepting everything they could get their hands on at the time.

However due to poor planning the donation was stored near salt water in a non climate controlled warehouse.

> https://twitter.com/amichlin/status/1778494138138124432

> "Well, it never should have been accepted in the first place. But literally everything was being accepted at the time. Finite space combined with salt water air was the culprit after the original poor planning."

It seems that the donation was split up by allowing others take what they wanted. (no reports on what happened to the rest)

> https://twitter.com/amichlin/status/1778494742742827195

> "And whoever told you they were thrown away was misinformed and not involved. There were cycles over and over again of allowing people to save anything they could carry. So it was split up, but mostly found good (not salt water rich) homes."

Note: Not taking sides - just stating what I read on Twitter/X/Whatever its called these days!

Well, that's better than all them being pulped. But not that much better, if it's all been split up and sent to private collections. I am pretty sure, knowing Jason Scott, that his intent was that this collection should be available to the public in some way, and not split up and effectively hidden.

Seems like amichlin is replying here too!

That's pure speculation. There's no reason to assume he randomly dropped off a ton of containers full of stuff without having prior communication/arrangement with them, or at the very least, an acknowledgement/acceptance of the material when he arrived.

It definitely does not sound like that. What a strange interpretation. Who would spend hundreds of dollars and hours of time just to do an unsolicited drop?

I'll take the L, without context and just reading the blog there wasn't any hint at coordination with the receiving party (besides the donation being accepted I suppose)

Speaking from experience tho people clearing out storage containers sometimes do strange things

Jason is an (the?) official archivist of archive.org. He's not just some dude grabbing spare containers of junk and dumping them. He knows what he's doing. :) hopefully this puts him on your radar. He's the one who was behind the software archive of old DOS programs and getting them running in emulation in the browser. Dude is super cool (he can be a curmudgeon at times, but what he DOES is cool).

I mean if the donation is unwanted, it is possible to deny it (you could even go the "we only want the containers" route). Or if the decision comes at a later point in time, one could ask the donor if he wants the stuff back (once again, possibly accompanied by "but we'd like to keep the containers").

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