COLLECTABLES

Dick Pountain /Idealog 373/ 08 Aug 2025 10:52  

I don’t really have the collectors’ instinct. When I was a kid my father was a serious stamp collector and I briefly made a feeble effort to be one too. I was slightly more interested in my album of labels from exotic canned goods, but that petered out pretty soon too. I find that in adulthood I’ve accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection. I have owned ten motorcycles over sixty or so years, but only ever one at a time. Books don’t count: I started accumulating those as a student and continued as a book reviewer, but all were obtained to read and never sold (there are around a thousand of them, none rare).

When I’m not writing about computers here I review books for a political journal, mainly ones about political economy and sociology. An author who had a big influence on me was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose best-known book ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste’ examined taste as an act of social status building, drawing on huge amounts of data gleaned from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews. Two former associates of his, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in 2014 published a paper called ‘The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets’ which is the best, most interesting account of collectability I’ve seen. B&E describe the way that all the things we manufacture, purchase and use pass through three phases of ownership, which they label the ‘standard form’, the ‘collectible form’ and the ‘asset form’. Consider for example a lemonade bottle from before WW1 with one of those stoppers that’s a caged glass marble. A mass-produced item, made as cheaply as possible, reusable and returnable for a penny. It served its purpose of containing and dispensing lemonade, then eventually got thrown in the bin (standard form). Years later someone found it on a tip and it ended up in an antique shop, sold for £15 to a middle-class couple as a kitchen ornament (collectible form). Their friend was a famous film director and it became a key prop in a very successful movie, and ended up sold for £5000 in a sale of memorabilia at Christie’s (asset form). An ancient Roman olive-oil jar might follow a comparable trajectory, but with prices several orders of magnitude higher. A drawing done on a napkin to pay for supper by a famous painter ditto, but its asset form might be in millions. In the asset form, things are no longer used, may often not even be displayed but stored in a vault, a hedge against inflation or financial crisis, a store of value.

What has this to do with computers you may be wondering. Well nothing actually, and that’s the point. Computers, along with much of the rest of the merchandise of the digital world, seem to defy B&E’s classification scheme by being stuck forever in the standard form: they end up in a skip, then get ripped apart to recycle a few chips and some gold-plating. The aesthetic appearance and quality of workmanship of such goods is so low that very, very few people want to collect them, and what’s more those few who do face insurmountable problems in keeping them 

working, due to the rapid and haphazard evolution of firmware, software, ports and cables, storage media, the lack of effective documentation, and the rapid disappearance of smaller manufacturers prior to the monopoly era we now inhabit. 

If you detect a faint tinge of animus in that last paragraph you’re correct, it’s because I have a room upstairs full of digital junk accumulated over my 40+ years of computer journalism that I can’t get rid of (and which those nearest and dearest to me would love to see dumped in a skip to reclaim the room). I can’t bring myself to do that. Along with some quite notable historic hardware – first-gen IBM PC and Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes, Newbrain, Epson HX20 – there are shelves full of software both famous and obscure that I have a hunch I may perhaps be the only person to still have, given my privileged status as recipient of review materials. The early history of the UK personal computer scene is sitting up there, and no-one appears to want it. I’ve tried all the various computer museums people have recommended, and none are interested in collecting the lot (I no longer have a car). All the reasons I mentioned above render it enormously hard for them to get this stuff working, and once they do it’s hardly entertaining. I do feel though that someone ought to document this history before skips claim it all. 

[Dick Pountain will hold onto the draw containing every Psion Organiser]

 

TOO DARNED HOT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 372/ 07 Jul 2025 01:15

I’ve been watching the rebellious mood that’s growing among Microsoft Windows 11 users with a degree of (not very nice) complacent amusement, as someone who dumped Windows in favour of a Chromebook more than eight years ago. Actually my defection was as much an accident as an example of prescient wisdom. When Dennis Publishing moved to new offices, then CEO James Tye took the quixotic decision to deploy Chromebooks to all, I took the opportunistic decision to borrow one and, being totally brassed-off with Windows 8.1, immediately became hooked. The Asus I bought for myself still works well and had been a source of great pleasure but for one problem – Google stopped supporting its version of ChromeOS with automatic updates about a year ago, and I started encountering apps that demanded an OS update I couldn’t procure. So I splashed out £229.99 on a new Asus CX3402 Chromebook Plus, which has a better screen, twice the memory, an 8-core Intel CPU and 10 years guaranteed updates. Migrating to the new machine was as arduous as usual: charge the battery, switch it on and wait 10 minutes for my online life to come down from the cloud. There were two extra chores though. Because in all matters digital I’m very far from being a trusting person, I also keep data I consider crucial on a local 128Gb memory stick that lives permanently in one USB port, so I had to unplug that and plug it into the new machine. Another quirk of mine is that I don’t really like touchpad cursor control and so use a Logitech Wireless Mouse whose dongle lives in another USB port.

I periodically backup the contents of the USB stick, a tiny metal-cased one from Integral, for which purpose I swap the Logitech dongle for another backup memory stick. A few weeks later I was doing such a backup when I noticed that the sticks had become very hot. Not warm but hot, hot enough to make me flinch on touching them, hot enough to worry. So I went online to the source of all wisdom which is Reddit, where I discovered that hundreds of people were reporting the same experience, not only with Chromebooks and with a variety of brands of stick, but in all cases when using them in USB-C ports. The consensus was that it’s OK, it’s because of the huge capacities of the current generation of sticks and the poor ventilation of the smaller cases. I pretended to believe that and to live with it for a few more months, until I started to get unreliable behaviour from the toasting stick. First it started unmounting at random times, though it always came back after unplugging and replacing. Then during a backup session, ‘copy failed’ messages and directories going missing from listings, at which point I panicked. I dug out my original old Asus where I confirmed that the contents of the stick were in fact intact, and that it didn’t get hot, and I carried out the backup there on the cool older USB ports. 

Something clearly had to be done because it’s become part of my work practice to keep this tiny, unknockoutable, USB stick permanently in place, and changing to some huge protruding one wasn’t acceptable. My first recourse was a heat-sink, cobbled together by wrapping the Integral stick tightly in aluminium cooking foil held in place with a 15mm binder clip with the handles detached. This worked, dissipating enough heat to reduce it to just warm to the touch, but it was too inelegant for me to live with. I couldn’t find any hard info online about which brands were most liable to overheat, but my own collection accumulated over the years revealed Sandisk, Patriot and Tab all got just as hot. As I was dolefully scrolling down the endless Amazon list of sticks, one from Samsung caught my eye because it looked nicer: the same shade of grey as my computer, short, fat and shiny. I ordered one and discovered that it’s just as fast, and barely gets warm… 

What moral to draw from this story I’m not really sure. I’m not a semiconductor engineer and can’t find an adequate explanation online from anyone who is, as to why such a huge discrepancy in performance exists between brands. Does the difference lie in the chips themselves, the design of the cases, the electrical interfaces or a problem in USB-C sockets? Such silence is deafening and disturbing when data loss is a distinct possibility. But of course the computer is becoming very much the poor cousin to the smartphone, for which such sticks are not relevant and for which professional standards of data hygiene are barely relevant either.    

[Dick Pountain still occasionally dreams that he’s trapped inside the Windows Registry]