[ExI] Yesterday's Mashed Potatoes

[Fred C. Moulton]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 18:49 -0500, Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 05:39 PM 4/18/2008 -0500, Bryan wrote:
> >  I think it's
> >also *two* decades, but there are no archives from that first decade,
> >so.
> 
> More than two decades, but yes, a lot of the early stuff is generally 
> unavailable. Even in 1996, when I wrote the first draft of THE SPIKE, 
> I depended on the personal archives of several generous extropes such 
> as John Clark (and got permission from everyone I cited).

This reminds me of thread just about 10 days ago about history.  Perhaps
if a complete archive was available historical studies would be more
complete and accurate.  In addition hard copy items such as the
proceedings of the first Extropy conference would be useful for
historical study.

I understand there are difficulties.  One is the logistics of recovering
the electronic records for various backups and servers.  Another is
organizing them in a reasonably accessible format.  These difficulties
might be overcome in part by hiring part time students to work on the
manual portions of the task.  Also we might have issues of some people
not wanting to have their words as part of an archive and others may
have no problem with the words being available but not them attributed
to themselves.  My memory is that this question of archiving was
discussed in the early days however my memory is fuzzy enough on this
that I would not hazard a guess as to the resolution.  These are real
issues but I am not convinced that they are not insurmountable.   The
more time that passes the more difficult the tasks will be.  So if
people are interested in the early history of Extropian, transhumanist
and related history the time to start is yesterday.

Fred

> Damien Broderick  
> 
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