Nov 30
2010

Decluttering

This is such a geeky posting I’m almost ashamed. Almost. 🙂

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up messing about with Acorn home computers. For the last twenty years (give or take) I have been collecting Acorn computer magazines – when I was growing up I was never really into football stickers.

Each time I went to a computer show I would check-out the second-hand/junk stall, and grab any surplus magazines. I’d never be too sure which magazines I was missing and which I already had, but my anally-retentive sense of “completeness” would kick-in, and I’d just take them all. Stick ’em all in the loft – worry about weeding out the duplicates later.

Fast-forward to today, and an impending house move. I consider my library of 8-bit geekery and reluctantly think to myself … maybe I could do without the stress of shifting those magazines. And they’re all available as scans now anyway.

I’m worried that if I don’t find a new home for them, they’ll be pulped. I’m pretty-sure that it is a collection that could be of interest to computing museums, or even other geeks who have spouses that are more forgiving than mine. So I put some “free to good home” messages out, and spend a weekend getting the magazines down from the loft and counting them.

It turns out that I have just over 2,000 magazines, spread over a dozen different titles across a twenty-five-year period. In case you’re interested in what such a collection looks like when it is all piled up in the middle of my living room, then wonder no longer (click for larger pics):