SOONEST MENDED

Dick Pountain/13 December 2005/14:57/Idealog 137

I've always loved mending things. This isn't because I'm too tight to buy new, but a rather more complicated matter: favourite tools, knives and the like feel good and I don't want them replaced with new; a few old things, like books or vases, are simply irreplaceable; but most importantly, there's a peculiar psychological satisfaction to be had from fighting back the dark forces of entropy and dissolution, in however small a way. On the other side of the coin, I can't stand working with broken things - I get claustrophobia whenever my motorbike is off the road, and I can't work with a limping PC until I've fixed whatever's wrong. For a while I even considered going into the restoration business as I'm a wizard with hi-tech adhesives and a dab-hand at color matching with a (real) paintbox. One recent triumph was repairing the hinge on a pair of cool 1950s sunglasses using a brass dressmaker's pin snipped flush using a well-sharpened end-cutter (so neatly that my spouse asked me to do the good hinge too).

This being the case, the computer business was a pretty rotten place for me to end up, since it lives by continually eating itself and spewing out an almost totally unusable residue. Of course it's not the only industry that depends on constant innovation to maintain the revenue stream. We've been aware of the techniques of 'planned obsolescence'  in everything from cars to white goods, ever since the 'The Waste Makers' in 1960. It isn't even the only industry that suffers both hardware and software obsolescence - if, like one of my acquaintances, you collect early opera recordings on wax cylinder, then keeping the hardware running becomes a matter of urgency. Nevertheless there is something uniquely final about the uselessness of an old computer, something that goes beyond the immediate facts.

Modern PCs are fixable, but only at a certain, rather coarse, level of granularity. We've all replaced power-supplies and hard disks, while of course monitors and keyboards are interchangeable anyway. Even on a laptop or a PDA the LCD or the motherboard can be replaced, at a price (and I've repaired minor damage to laptop cases with Superglue many a time). But once you start to talk about repairing individual circuit boards, forget it. Any printed circuit *could* be repaired in principle, using a solder pump and a magnifying glass to swap out components and fix broken traces, but only on the dubious assumption that you can find out what's broken in the first place. If you had a logic probe, and the manufacturer's documentation, and several spare days, you might even do that. To mend a hard disk you'd need equipment similar to what the manufacturer used to build it, and repairing a semiconductor IC like a CPU is impossible even for the manufacturer. In all these cases, the most sensible advice is always to swap the whole thing for new. The whole industry is built around components that require ultra-hi-tech machines to manufacture, but individually are disposably cheap. This hardware is supported by system software that's essential to make it do anything useful, but until quite recently has been lamentably managed and archived. Finding drivers for a 1980s printer is a serious challenge if you haven't got the original disk (and if you have, finding a drive to read it in is another).

All this has some important consequences. For one, there's a problem over formats for long-term archival storage of data, which I've written about here before and which is now taken very seriously indeed by the world's great museums and libraries. For another, the second-hand market for computers is very limited compared to that for, say, cars, and the scope for collecting vintage computers is more restricted still. (An ex-Byte colleague of mine founded a US-based newsletter for vintage computer collectors, but minicomputers like the PDP-8 appear to inspire more affection than PCs, apart from the Apple 1 and Lisa). Plenty of people drive around the world in classic cars, but actually using even a 20-year old computer for everyday work is almost inconceivable: even if you do still have the OS and drivers, modern data files are not backward-compatible so you'd be forever having to write converters, and their sheer size defeats old CPU speeds.

About the most irrevocable change that can happen to any computer technology is a change of processor word-width (only a change of endedness is worse), and of course that's precisely what we're now facing with the move up to 64-bit computing: Microsoft has announced that the next version of Exchange Server will be 64-bit only, and there are hints that Longhorn Server itself may be too. The writing is on the wall for the 32-bit PC and the dusty graveyard of unfixable boxes that glowers from under my workbench can expect some new occupants soon...

Fortunately so long as a little petrol remains, there'll always be vehicles to fix. Did I tell you about the time the silencer fell off my brother-in-law's 1939 Lagonda, deep inside a forest in Southern Moravia? No? Well, we strapped it back up with fencing wire, as you do, and tried to seal the joint with Araldite, but it was too greasy to take properly. That's when we discovered that 25-year-old, cask-strength, Ardbeg whisky is also an excellent de-greasing agent...