[NJARC] COmputer destroyed in fire

[Jim Whartenby]

John
You should have been at Sarnoff when they had the periodic mass clean ups.  You wouldn't believe what was trashed for lack of storage space.  And then there was the storage building at Sarnoff that had to be at least 150 feet square with 10 foot ceilings; if I remember correctly.  Every once in a while a big 40 foot container was placed at the building's loading dock and filled with old test equipment, developmental prototypes of all sorts of other odds and ends.  All of it went to the dump.

ATT had the same problem as does any other individual or organization.  To Bell Labs credit, they had a college gift program that gave serviceable items to local institutions, I don't remember hearing about  a similar  program at Sarnoff or any other company for that matter.

How easy was it for Alex to find a new home for the Sarnoff collection?  Reading about your concern for the lost items in the barn fire, I assume that you offered to help catalog, sort, box and lug the Sarnoff Collection.  Has any one individual or organization stepped up to the plate and offered to take it all?  How about most of it?  How much, in the end, will still be trashed?

And after one finds a taker, are there any guarantees that they will have the same value of worth as you do for any one item in question?  What would they cull to make room for other items that may be of higher worth?  Or of lesser value since this will always be subject to personal opinion.

What to keep and what to let go?

In the end, carping is a whole lot easier to do then to help find a workable solution to the storage problem.  It will always be an issue of one mans junk to another mans treasure.  But unfortunately, 99.999% of the population thinks of it as junk.  But of course this is just my own personal opinion.
Regards,
Jim

--- On Wed, 12/9/09, John Ruccolo <jr6v6gt at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi Rob,
> 
> > Oh well, you can't save everything.
> 
> I beg to differ -- through stubborness, obstinance,
> procrastination or whatever it was, *nothing* was saved --
> it was all destroyed. And that's the shame of it. 
> 
> I Googled "kagan barn" and came up with this, among
> others:
> 
> http://www.trentonian.com/articles/2009/12/05/news/doc4b19d7bfe4d3f869768651.txt
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> JR
> 
> --- On Wed, 12/9/09, Rob Flory <robandpj at earthlink.net>
> wrote:
> > People's priorities often change with age.
> > 
> > My grandfather referred to his collection of
> museum-quality
> > items as "that pile of junk".
> > 
> > I can't blame Mr. Kagan at age 80(?) for not having a
> > burning desire to deal with the disposal of a computer
> that
> > weighs in in the thousands of pounds.
> > 
> > Oh well, you can't save everything.
> > 
> > Rob Flory