The Don Maslin Software Archive

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Sun, 15 May 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:

> On Sun, 15 May 2005 shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com wrote:
>
> >> are you a packrat (as Don apparently was) or a collector?
> >
> > Don was neither.  He was a true archivist, in this case working
> > for the CP/M community.
>
> On the heels of my foolish posting (see accompanying apology) this
> sounds a bit off, but here goes:
>
> But don't archivists make their archives available? Clearly, Don's
> is not. If Don had been loosely operating an informal library,
> then his family would have at least a faint handle on what to do
> with it.

Don was operating as an informal library.  However, when I spoke to his
wife last year not too long after Don passed away, she explained to me
that she was completely unaware of what he was doing.

> My attempt at a point earlier was that he was packratting, making a big
> pile of stuff with no real plans for the future. This appears to be
> fact.

The only thing Don didn't do was plan for an "unplanned departure".  As
far as we know, he never got around to writing a will for his computer
collection.  But Don was definitely not a packrat.  He was an archivist of
system disks and actively collected and catalogued them.  It remains to be
seen how universal his catalog was but hopefully we'll get a chance to
find out.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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