Who says we're in a post-industrial or a post-post-industrial society? We're in the beginning of the second dark age.
Last month, O'Reilly pulled off OSCon 2002. The event that kicked this off was The Perl Conference 1.0 in 1997. The second conference was called The Perl Conference 2.0, and was held at the same location in 1998.
Now, just try to find any record of either of these events anywhere at O'Reilly.com or (the O'Reilly run) Perl.com. Most of the history of these events has vanished -- the only links that Google can find about TPC 1 allude to the fact that either (1) it happened or (2) spawned O'Reilly's conference business. The TPC 2.0 links are far fewer, but do list the six people who won $1000 awards for "best paper"s. (Yes, Damian got one.)
Sadly, the wayback machine doesn't do much better...
If you like, I can make copies and send them to you (or someone) where they can be posted online, although I/you/whoever may want to ask the original author's permission first (I only remember Jeff Friedl at the moment, but I believe the presenter's names are all on the front of the bound copies).
I can also tell you that it was in San Jose, and that they handed out "The Perl Cookbook" that year.
Re:Some history preserved
ziggy on 2002-08-09T21:27:42
It would be nice to have the tutorial handouts on the web, but there are some issues with that. First, people who attended those sessions had to pay extra for each half-day tutorial. Second, some of the presenters teach/taught those classes for their livelihood. That's not to say that these issues can't be resolved, just that there's a legitimate reason to hold off (at least four or five years.:-) What I'd like to see preserved are things like the CFP, the program and schedule, the refereed papers, news and reports from the event, photos and the like. There aren't any drawbacks to putting those materials online, and in fact there's probably a big incentive to maintain them.
I don't want to sound like I'm harping on O'Reilly about this one; other conference organizers (IDG, CMP, YAS) are also just as bad. Somehow, I don't find their events to be as important as TPC/OSCon.
:-)
Both the first two TPCs are mentioned in the Perl Timeline. There are links to various people's photos.
Re:Some Links
ziggy on 2002-08-09T21:40:56
Yes, there are links to be found on the web, and the perl history is a good place for them. But the [online] conference materials themselves still seem to have been lost.Re:Some Links
hfb on 2002-08-10T15:27:26
This depends on your definition of 'lost'.
O'Reilly, to the best of my knowledge, never had conference proceedings on-line for TPC1 or TPC2. At TPC1 we were all given a very splashy gold binder with 'THE POWER OF PERL' emblazoned on the spine to accompany the mousepad, tote bag, t-shirt and 20 pounds of other stuff I had to carry around. The binder was beautiful and had tabs for 'perl and the web', 'programming perl', perl for win32', 'user applications', website' and 'addendum'. In the front of the binder is a letter from Tim O'Reilly that uses the word 'freeware' frequently instead of the later coined 'open source'.
"Our commitment to Perl now goes beyond documenting it. Which leads to an important second point. We at O'Reilly want to create a safe harbor for Perl, one protecting it from the forces of unbridled commercialism and yet giving it easy access to the open seas. Almost always when freeware is pulled within a commercial entity, barriers are built between the commercial entity and the freeware community that causes development to stagnate. The harbor becomes a lifeless lake. Not only do we recognize this as a mistake from a commercial point of view, it runs completely counter to our historical roots and belief system.Malcom Beattie talked about the perl compiler and Selena Sol gave a presentation on 'Building a Web Storefront". A Bioperl talk by Steve Brenner and 'Inside Regular Expressions' by Jeff Friedl. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, now infamous, was a late plenary session. TPC1 was 2 days of tutorials and 2 days of conference. It had a small USENIX feel to it with more academic papers and talks. TPC3 expanded the conference track to 3 days and the whole open source melee.
TPC2, while held in the same location, didn't distribute a binder containing all the refereed papers. There was a tape bound collection of them distributed at TPC3 which then became glossy published books for TPC4 and TPC5. TPC6 this year, as far as I know, will not be publishing such a bound copy of the proceedings.
People are the keepers of history, not the wayback machine.
Re:Some Links
ziggy on 2002-08-10T16:21:30
As I originally mentioned, there's no reference to the older conferences anywhere on oreilly.com or perl.com. The online artifacts are no longer.This depends on your definition of 'lost'.Looking back, I did overstate the case somewhat.
Right. That year, they were distributed on CD, and for a while O'Reilly had put a copy of that CD online. I've got a few copies buried somewhere in the detrius of two 3,000+ mile moves...TPC2, while held in the same location, didn't distribute a binder containing all the refereed papers.Re:Some Links
hfb on 2002-08-10T18:15:57
Is there any reason to expect ORA to keep a 5+ year archive of the conferences? The web is mercurial at best. I make PDFs of everything from web pages I find these days since, as the timeline surely illustrates in its 600+ links, things go missing very often and never return. Such is the nature of the electronic world...pull the power plug and it's gone.
I only vaguely remember the 2.0 CD and can't seem to locate it in my pile of stuff...maybe Gnat can find an extra lying about....but I doubt it would remain online very long. Many of the articles from past years are not available either. Don't rely on the internet to be an archive as you'll be disappointed far more often than you'd like to think.
Re:Some Links
ziggy on 2002-08-10T18:52:13
Expect? Maybe, maybe not. There's probably more precedent and incentive for conference organizers to focus exclusively on upcoming revenue opportunities (er, conferences) than keeping an archive of past events.Is there any reason to expect ORA to keep a 5+ year archive of the conferences?Then again, not every conference organizer is particularly interested in fostering a community, rather than making money by attracting a attendees to upcoming events. Two organizers who are trying to build healthy developer communities already do keep online archives of past conferences.
ORA seems to think it's a good idea as well. Their current conference archive goes back to the beginning of 2001. This probably reflects what content was currently online at the time the site was last redesigned, more than a statement that conference archives are meaningless after n months.
Re:Some Links
hfb on 2002-08-10T19:23:25
Do YAPC and USENIX keep online archives of all their conferences? These are both community based conferences who, to the best of my knowledge, keep little of the conference proceedings online with USENIX only listing the bibliography and YAPC having abstracts and links to the authors pages sans proceedings. It takes time and someone to manage all that data to keep it online in a coherent presentation. Maybe you could volunteer to be the ORA and YAPC proceedings archivist.
Re:Procedings published ? Listed on Amazon
ziggy on 2002-08-09T21:35:56
Availability isn't that limited. They've been given away for free at the last 2 YAPC's. I don't remember if O'Reilly produced proceedings for TPC1. For TPC2 and perhaps TPC3[*], there was a CD for the proceedings. TPC4 and TPC5 had the printed books. I honestly don't even remember if there was a refereed papers track at TPC6 this year; there weren't any printed or digital proceedings either.Availability of the print proceedings isn't really as important as keeping an online record of the conference two, three or five years later. For example, I remember Marcelo's talk (I wandered into the room before for that slot), but I always have to go to Network Solutions to look up his last name, and I can't remember the title of his talk (or find his paper).
[*] TPC3 may have had print/photocopied proceedings, but TPC4 certainly was the first year that they were bound in a glossy volume.
Re:Procedings published ? Listed on Amazon
kasei on 2002-08-10T07:15:32
[*] TPC3 may have had print/photocopied proceedings, but TPC4 certainly was the first year that they were bound in a glossy volume.
TPC3 did indeed have (paper bound) proceedings, "Perl Conference 3.0 Refereed Papers.". It's fairly hefty - slightly larger than 4.0 (which was larger than 5.0), but it has neither page numbers nor cataloging information. It does however contain some real gems such as Damian's Coy (all ten pages written in haiku), Class::Multimethods, and Tie::SecureHash papers
:)
To begin with, in order to have a Second Dark Age there'd need to have been a First One already. And that's a highly controversial topic to boot.
Second -- and much more importantly -- don't you see something fundamentally flawed about your approach? No? Where did you look for info about TPC? Google, and a few other places on the internet. Think '97. Think where info on that may be. What are the chances that it is on the net somewhere? Small imho. It may be -- and in fact surely is -- in personal mail boxes, diaries (the kind that was written on paper), letter, postcards, printed proceedings etc... I'm pretty certain that if you were to launch a packrats initiative to recover information about those events, you would get a lot. And that's only what a historian would do in this case.
You seem to me -- though I may be wrong -- to be expecting history from five years ago to be as readily available as today's, now that we have blogs and trigger-happy DV all over the place
The latter part bringing me to another point: it was only temporary. With the profusion of data being made available on public servers, and a good amount of it being backed up (at least compared to what it was 2.000 years ago) I don't think we're losing our history -- perlian or general. We're losing large chunks of it, but that's inevitable, but we're losing much less than we used to
Re:Second Dark Age?
hfb on 2002-08-10T15:33:53
:) Some of us spend a good bit of time collecting perlish bits that may not be readily available but, maybe in 20 years or so, will be appreciated by posterity. I have one gem that I ran across yesterday that, in light of last september, would raise a few eyebrows though it was a spoof from 2000. Ah, nostalgia
:) If you are into perl history, join the packrats mailing list and share your archives. I just bought a honking firewire disk to consolidate my archives into one place. I always welcome more stuff.
:) Re:Second Dark Age?
ziggy on 2002-08-10T16:04:18
Actually, the issue isn't really about throwing stones at O'Reilly for not making my trigger happy lifestyle as easy as I want it to be, although I do see how you could interpret it that way. The issue I want to raise is that for all of the talk about Perl community, there seems to be a distinct lack of interest in preserving our collective history.You seem to me -- though I may be wrong -- to be expecting history from five years ago to be as readily available as today's, now that we have blogs and trigger-happy DV all over the place:-) Sun is actually doing a very commendable job in maintaining artifacts of past JavaOne conferences. (Then again, they do spend a significant amount of time, effort and money in usability research.) The Python folks do something similar.
Perhaps. We'll see if there are more substantially more five-year old webpages still around in five years than there are today. I certainly hope so.The latter part bringing me to another point: it was only temporary.
When the ORA online publishing group folks were removing the old conferences from the web, I told them to make sure there was a tarball archive available. I requested those archives on Friday, so we'll find out next week whether they actually listen to me or not
--Nat
Re:TPC3 and earlier
ziggy on 2002-08-10T16:28:18
Thanks gnat!Hunting through google and the wayback machine, it looked like a simple case of not finding/making a place for the old materials in a few web redesigns. Thanks for saving it.
