The Home Machinist!

Looks like Yahoo is pulling the plug on all their groups.

Apparently the Brown & Sharpe Group, which I'm a half owner, with all its reams of information will be a wisp of smoke!

Again this demonstrates the ephemeral nature of the Internet, Websites, and the so called Cloud!

I have no intention of downloading ~ 20 years of B&S posts, the same thing will happen to all the other groups we all belong to.

Google way back around 2003 also had Groups.

I posted the on their "Old Machinery" site the work of restoring my B&S #2 Mill.

A few years later, Google abandoned all the sites: POOF!

Thanks for the warning. A lot of good info is going to get lost.

And I thought this post was going to be about Montauk NY!

Thus the problem with the internet, and any electronic device for that matter. Eventually it goes poof and you loose everything. Unfortunately most people nowadays don't know what paper backup is....go figure.

Nyle

People in my generation have shoe boxes full of family pictures. All different sizes and finish, some fading Polaroid and the yellowing pictures of great grandma and a old aunt nobody remember the name, perhaps there is a name and a date in the back.
The box is passed on divided among siblings. My children have several thousand pictures of their children stored on a layer of iron oxide a few atom thick, spinning 5000 RPM and relying on a pickup coil flying a few micron over the surface.
I do not think the descendant will ever huddle around a computer to look how funny grandpa looked wearing the pants up to is nipples.

Information loss has always been an issue; paper burns or rots, memories fade, you can't carve much in stone and even that won't last forever.
In this case, the information is simply being discarded because no one is willing to pay for it's maintenance.

Maybe all this information should be etched into unobtainium.

Check out groups.io - you can directly port a lot of that info over. Not sure what can/can't get ported over but seems a lot of former yahoo groups have been going that way for a while even before the end was announced.

One of the guys on Yahoo Brown & Sharpe said he would attempt to bring all the B&S stuff now on Yahoo over to Groups.io, so I gave him the permission to try.

I have three mills and one surface grinder, and a large collection of B&S printed materials, I really do not need that information for my use.

If B&S had not printed all that material since the middle 1800's, would we, today, have any knowledge of who they were?

Whether he succeeds or not, it certainly was nice to hear from those who were restoring or had Brown & Sharpe machines of all kinds over almost twenty years.

liveaboard wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2019 5:33 pm Information loss has always been an issue; paper burns or rots, memories fade, you can't carve much in stone and even that won't last forever.
In this case, the information is simply being discarded because no one is willing to pay for it's maintenance.

This is true that papers burn and rot, but some items do survive hundreds if not thousands of years,
I have some glass plate photo negatives that are at least 100 yrs old more or less and they contact print
or scan nicely.
I've always jokingly predicted that 100 years from now there will be void in visual/printed information.

Back to to topic, the Yahoo Emco lathe group is dilly dallying about a move, I'm not sure who even maintains the group
but they need to act soon, the Yahoo notice was that Oct 28 2019 ends all file uploads, Dec 14 all uploaded files are deleted.