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