The PC will never be collectable

While many items of 1980s and 1990s culture have become valuable assets beloved of collectors, PCs and their cousins are never quite as coveted

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The PC will never be collectable While many items of 1980s and 1990s culture have become valuable assets beloved of collectors, PCs and their cousins are never quite as coveted Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He will hold onto the drawer containing every Psion Organiser, so don't even ask. dickpountain.co.uk

I don’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 In adulthood I've accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection.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 Taste examined taste as an act of social status building, drawing on huge amounts of data gleaned from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews.