Tag Archives: distributed computer museum

Science or Sentiment, Generalized

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Career “trophies”, coffee mugs, one of which was created by dye printing technology (depicting our development team), the other a memento commemorating the issue of an arcane patent.

There is a more general problem related to the “what to do with old lab notebooks” that some of us face.  It is what to do with our shoeboxes of photos (virtual digital shoeboxes and real ones).  And written correspondence.  Love letters.  Birthday cards and holiday cards that caught our attention enough that we saved them.  The trophies, actual physical trophies, or the certificates of commendation for a job well done.  Birth and death announcements.  Souvenirs of our travels, the mementos of the high points of our lives. 

All of them carry great meaning to us, invoking a romantic haze of fond memories from those times and places, for those people and events.  Yet those memories are internal to us; they are not shared, even with the persons we may have shared the moment with—at least not exactly. Each of them has his or her own version of those scenes.  And they are not shared in the same way with our children, and certainly not their children.  Our lives are an abstraction to them.  They weren’t even around when the main story was unfolding.

I have come to realize this in the last few years as I have processed the items left behind by my parents after their deaths.  I have a high regard for my father’s technical acumen and his many projects.  Some of them were to gather and archive family history, others documented his personal interests.  He was always an early adopter of technology and embraced digital photography well before I did.  He acquired a large collection of both film and digital pictures, organized in shoeboxes and digital folders.  He worked to digitally scan historic family photos that dated back to the 19th century. 

There is a treasure trove of history here, some even recent enough to overlap with my own, yet I do not find myself compelled to explore it.  And therein lies the problem.  If I am not inspired to carry forward the artifacts of prior generations, why would I expect subsequent generations to propagate mine?

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Career’s End

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From my gun collection: an electron gun, extracted from a cathode ray tube

After years of fearing the consequences of corporate RIFs (“reduction in force”), aka layoffs, and having survived a dozen or more of them, I had finally reached the point where losing my job would have a lesser consequence.  I had built up my savings in anticipation of some future retirement and was now working for the sheer pleasure of it.  

I had always declared that if the work became tiresome or that I was no longer learning things, I would move on to something else.  But those conditions never happened, and at age 65, a time when many decide to hang it up for an easier day, I found that my company was still interested in what I had to offer.  I continued my happy employment, pleased to be paid for work that was valued.

That changed this last summer, when the company was acquired by a venture capital firm that offered a stock premium in exchange for taking it private and pursuing a new business plan. I hope that the company will thrive and continue their pioneering transformation of the print industry from analog presses to digital, but I will not be there to see it.  

My ride along that road has ended, as the new management has deemed my color imaging scientist position no longer required.  Though I will miss the technical challenges and problem-solving, this actually works out well for me.  

I had been wondering how to transition to part-time status in order to more fully engage in the activities promoted by my travel-addicted partner.  Further, I have no shortage of personal projects that have been put on hold over the years, and new ones that are still being formulated.  I contemplated what would happen if the daytime hours suddenly became available to pursue them.

I am currently finishing up my work for the company and clearing my office.  Decades of projects have left behind strata of artifacts: notebooks, schematics, prototypes, presentations, test prints, research papers, and a myriad of business cards of professional contacts. As I encounter them, I must perform a version of triage:  discard/recycle, preserve for whomever next takes them on, or claim them for my personal scrapbook, including the “distributed computer museum”.  It is all a trigger for nostalgia.

I don’t have time for reminiscing now though.  To plow through it, I make the unreliable promise to review it again later, when I can properly share it with the people that I worked with, and the families that lived through it.  I will attempt to craft a proper story around each artifact.  Maybe they will serve as an informal history of the life and times of what has been a wonderful and fascinating career.