No Oceans Left
--------------
There's a refrain from a Leonard Cohen song that plays in my
head from time to time:
I saw there were no oceans left
for scavengers like me
It's from "A Thousand Kisses Deep," on the album "Ten New
Songs" released back in 2001. Cohen had been working on the
lyrics for a while before that though; there are recorded
and published versions dating back to at least the
mid-90s. One of them appears on the the "Leonard Cohen
Files" site, quite different from what eventually became the
official, recorded version.[1] The earliest versions are
about love and betrayal - well-trodden ground for Cohen -
and about how aging makes a mockery of physical love. But
the version that appeared on the album strips most of that
away, and what remains is harder to parse but seems to me
more about aging and loss, and that line in particular about
how the world changes around you as you get older, so that
the world you grew up in, the world that you adapted to and
were part of, eventually ceases to exist.
It's something I've been feeling lately in my professional
life. I started working in Library IT back in the mid-late
1990s, when pretty much everything remained to be done,
nobody really had a handle on the web yet, and we were all
hacking together weird and wonderful solutions to problems
that hadn't even existed five years previously. I
discovered I had a bit of a knack for developing what I
eventually came to refer to as "minimum viable product" -
coaxing computers to get the job done in the simplest, most
cost-effective way possible, whether the job was putting 80
years of a newspaper online, or fixing our malfunctioning
interlibrary loan system, tracking library usage stats, or
whatever. It was fun, it was useful, and I kind of built my
career around it.
But now, almost 30 years on, there's less and less demand
for that kind of thing. Big, cumbersome, overbuilt and
expensive 'solutions' from cloud vendors are the order of
the day, and the kind of seat of the pants development I cut
my coding teeth on are increasingly frowned upon in the
ever-more corporate and locked-down IT environment of the
contemporary university. Things change, I'll adapt, but I'm
sorry to see it go the way it has.
And then there's another context in which I think the oceans
are probably drying up, for me. Totally predictable and no
great tragedy, but Cohen's lyric is particularly apt in this
case, because it literally involves scavenging.
Back in 2016 I began building a collection of old computer
hardware as a kind of off-the-side-of-my-desk research
project. It came about mostly by chance, the outcome of a
study leave looking at ways the library could effectively
manage, preserve, and access the contents of some legacy
digital media in the University Archives. I was initially
more focussed on emulation than hardware preservation, but
when I was offered a kind of 'starter' collection of old
gear from our surplus warehouse, I couldn't really turn it
down.
In the years following I worked with our Surplus Coordinator
to identify and recover a whole lot of older computing gear
taking up space in various departmental storage rooms across
campus. There were some amazing finds, from as far back as
the 1960s and 70s, though (of course) more from the 80s and
90s. I was going to provide some examples, but I think
there's enough there for a whole other phlog post, and this
one is already getting kind of long. Suffice it to say,
it's kind of amazing how much of this old gear was still
resident on campus, and makes me wonder what I could have
rescued had I started this project a few years earlier.[2]
In the intervening 8 years there have been a number of times
when I thought, "That's got to be it, there can't be
anything out there left for me to scavenge." And then
someone else would retire, or another department would clear out
a little-used storage area, and I'd get another email from
our Surplus Coordinator asking me if I wanted to come take a
look at the unearthed treasures now on offer to the Library.
But now? Well, I'm not holding out hope of future finds of
any great significance. Pretty much all the likely
departments have been cleared out, plus many of the less
likely ones. Which from a certain perspective may be just
as well, as I've pretty much run out of places in the
Library to stash this stuff.
Next up: Some Old Computers I Found on Campus, 2016-2024
References
----------
[1]
https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/kisses.html
[2]
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?search/1434017/&c[users]=swylie
(Yeah, I missed out on some good stuff)
Fri Aug 9 13:34:55 PDT 2024
