PCPRO October 2025
Idon’t really have the collector’s instinct. When I was a kid my father was a serious stamp collector, and I briefly made a feeble effort to become one too. I was slightly more interested in my album of labels from exotic canned goods, but that soon petered out. In adulthood I’ve accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection.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 60 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 Judgement of Tasteexamined 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 Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, published a 2014 paper called “The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets”, which is the best, most interesting account of collectability I’ve seen. The authors 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”.
The aesthetic appearance and quality of workmanship of computers is so low that few people want to collect them
Consider a lemonade bottle from before the First World War 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 in a tip; 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 £5,000 in a sale of memorabilia at Christie’s (asset form).
An ancient Roman olive-oil jar might follow a comparable trajectory, 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 got 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 the three-phase 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 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 storage media, plus the lack of effective documentation, and the rapid disappearance of smaller manufacturers prior to the monopoly era we now inhabit.
I have a room full of digital junk that I can’t get rid of. Digital junk that those nearest and dearest to me would love to see dumped in a skip
If you think you can detect a faint tinge of animus in that last paragraph, you’re correct. I have a room upstairs full of digital junk accumulated over my 40+ years of computer journalism that I can’t get rid of. Digital junk that 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 is 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@dickpountain.co.uk
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