1 Feb
2022
1 Feb
'22
2:06 a.m.
On 1/31/22 7:03 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Then be amazed. It happened most recently just a few months ago, and
several times last year. This is a lot more common in the real world
than you've assumed.
Well, that's a tough choice then.
Wow, DEC sure did go down a bad path with suits. :-/
Understood.
(sorry for being terse, I'm being called for dinner)
Until the day I die... Who knows what happens then.
Well, I'm trying to get more (and younger) people interested in
PDP-11s, and I'm having pretty good success at that. You could try that
too.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Because for some people, that "near zero
risk" is maybe not so "near
zero", and that have actual implications for actual people.
Yes, but they've been poorly (and selfishly) prioritized.
You seem to really just treat it as "there is no
risk, so why aren't
people just doing whatever I think they should do", without considering
that for others the situation might actually look very different.
You've jumped to a conclusion about what I think, and (with respect)
you're incorrect. I think risking some suit in a glass building getting
angry with me, or even filing a lawsuit against me, is not, and will
never be, more important than a piece of history that stands to be lost
forever.
At the very least, things can be quietly copied around and saved, for
the day when all of those suits (and the short-term profits that they
care about) are dead and the materials can be shared freely and openly.
I'm not
speaking in theoretical terms. That exact sentence has
been said TO MY FACE, more than once, by people in conversations about
sending materials to LSSM.
If you've experienced that recently, then I am a little amazed. Because
that means people have been hanging on to things for a *long* time, but
now they don't care. Which for me sounds like an unusual situation.
But of course, everything is possible. Making arrangements would be nice, but it's not
always that easy. But at
least keeping the bits around allows for the rest to possibly happen. If
the bits are lost, the rest don't matter.
So obviously, preserving the bits are the first priority no matter what
the rest looks like.
The rest we can work on later.
I agree with you here.
I still am trying all the time to maybe get something
more sorted. But
it's been no true progress so far.
But Dave is definitely a guy who was trying to do things right. I see no
reason to blame him because of that.
Ok, I understand, and I appreciate being informed.
That's
absolutely awful, and now I understand the situation a lot
better. It would probably have been beneficial for him to have said
something about this in some forum somewhere, so that people who
aren't "in the cool kids crowd" can know what happened.
He didn't see any point of talking about that in other forums. All he
felt that could do was to possibly catch the attention of HPE, which he
definitely did not want to happen. Al Kossov from bitsavers were in the loop, and also
trying to help get
things released. But he had no more luck than the rest of us.
So it's not that noone else knew or were involved. But Dave kept the
number low for the stated reasons, and I guess you are just too new to
have become involved in this loop.
Well, neither Al nor most of the rest of that crowd tend to pay me
any mind, despite what I've accomplished over the years. That's a
different matter. But like it or not, I'm preserving things too, as we
are at LSSM.
"New" I am not. For 37 years I've been running, programming,
repairing, buying, selling, etc DEC hardware and software, and I've
accomplished quite a bit. I guess I just don't brag about it enough;
people chose not to involve me.
So, as with
pretty much everything else, the damn suits ruined it.
That is definitely true. The specifics of the contract between DEC and
Mentec seems to have been complex. DEC sold the software to Mentec.
However, there is some clause in there that allows DEC to just take it
all back under some circumstances, if I got it right. And that is what
Dave was worried about HPE potentially doing, which would legally force
him to delete everything he had. Which in his eyes would have been very
bad, since he obviously didn't trust HPE to actually do anything good if
that happened.
That's a reasonable stance. But "yes sir I've deleted that" are
words that are easy to say.
Again, thank you for explaining the situation to me.
I will try
to locate him. It's possible that he may be amenable to
an arrangement with a corporate nonprofit entity like LSSM, whose
purpose is to preserve such things, rather than an individual.
If you manage to locate him, that would already be a good start.
Let's start with that. Dave certainly talked a lot with CHM earlier as
well, but didn't transfer to them either.
Because in the end, it's not so much about who it passed on to. It's
more about possibly drawing the attention of HPE that worried him.
And if HPE got involved, the risk was that all the software actually
would become unavailable. In Dave's view, the current situation was
better than that alternative. And I have a contract with XX2247, giving me access to
whatever. You
could say that I'm the last RSX developer. :-)
...and it is in excellent hands. :-)