Used and Antique Machines

This weekend, we held a ReMake event at ACCRC in Berkeley, giving makers coming to Maker Faire a chance to look for a few interesting things to play with. The previous weekend, ACCRC had held an Earth Day electronics collection, and James Burgett had put out bins of fascinating things to take apart or just to take. Of course, all of this technology, had been thrown away, and would end up in a dumpster but for ACCRC's efforts to explore alternatives.

As I looked at stacks of equipment, most of it no longer functional, or serving any function for which it was built, I recognized that the nature of these objects had changed. They were different from what they were intended to be. I could now view much of this machinery as having been transformed and becoming beautiful. They were not just used, but they had acquired something which perhaps accrues from use.

Just like a really old junker of a car or old pottery chards in a museum. In this light, vacuum tubes are like old pocket watches. I wondered less about how these machines worked and just appreciated that they held fast to a particular place and time. Looking at a Mac Classic is like listening to an old song. (And we do have FM stations that call it classic rock.)

Were these just old machines? Which ones might be considered antiques? Sellam Ismail of the Vintage Computer Festival was finding old radios that he wanted to save from the heap. They were vintage and deserved to be separated out and rescued.

It's kind of odd to think of machines as antiques, especially electronic or digital. These ordinary things that are less than twenty years old might as well be a hundred. They have aged that quickly but even so, they have picked up a patina faster than furniture.

Last week in Minnesota, I saw a display of old tools in a machine shop. They belonged to the owner's grandfather, and no longer in use, they were displayed as objects of unusual interest, making a connection to the past as well as the people who once used them. They seem to be part of the same aesthetic as the more recent machines taking up space at ACCRC.