[GreenKeys] If you thought ebay prices were ridiculous

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

The new issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on an auction of documents
relating to the origins of computing.

Some of the stuff is genuinely rare, like a handwritten manuscript by
Jacquard that went for $26,400.  But an issue of IEEE Transactions on
Communications (containing Vint Cerf's proposal for the packet switched
network) went for $4,800.  And a 1938 AIEE Transactions containing
Claude Shannon's paper on symbolic logic and switching circuits went
for $15,600.  A Bell Labs monograph with a Shannon paper went for $9,000.
These are things that should be in any good engineering library.
Will libraries have to move the old AIEE Transactions to the rare book
room and put them under lock and key?  After all, there are papers by
Edison and Bell and Steinmetz and other luminaries in there too.




jhhaynes at earthlink dot net