A letter to my Patreon supporters (Patreon)

Many of you often ask me why I keep buying computers, consoles and other electronic devices and especially what I do with them once I repair them! The simplest answer is: I keep them, of course I add them to my collection.

But for me, it is not just about collecting in the classic sense. I do not buy these things just to place them on a shelf or just to say that I own them. I like looking for them, studying them, understanding why they were made, what place they had in the market at the time and why some of them ended up being forgotten

One of the things I enjoy the most is finding the strangest consoles, the lesser known computers and all those devices that maybe were not very successful when they first came out. Very often, those are the most interesting ones, because they tell the story of a different path, an alternative idea, or an experiment that maybe did not work commercially, but is now fascinating to rediscover.

And this passion is not limited to computers and consoles. It applies to almost any piece of electronics: VCRs, typewriters, calculators, old accessories, strange peripherals and many other devices that often get forgotten, stored away or simply considered useless

The part that attracts me the most, though, is when these things do not work :)

I know it may sound strange 😅 but I often prefer buying something broken rather than something already perfectly working. At that point, I am not just buying an object for my collection. I am recovering something that would probably have been put aside or worse thrown away and even when the repair does not go the way I hoped, there is still something to learn like a component to study, a board to inspect or a problem to understand better for the next time.

That is one of the things I care about the most! Very often, when something stops working people immediately get discouraged. I completely understand that because at the beginning I was also scared of breaking everything. I was scared of opening a device, touching the wrong component and making things worse.

But that fear, even if it is understandable, leads to so many computers, consoles and electronic devices being thrown away, even when they could still be repaired or at least studied. Sometimes the issue is small, sometimes it is much more complicated but the point is that very often nobody even tries to understand it. I think devices should be made to be repaired, even today (Actually, especially today) Instead, I often feel like many modern phones, computers and electronic devices are designed more to be replaced after a few years than to truly last over time. This is not only a problem for people who enjoy repairing things or collecting old electronics. It is something bigger than that. When a device becomes impossible or too difficult to open, understand and repair, we also lose part of our relationship with the objects we use every day.

We become more distant from the hardware. We stop asking ourselves how something works. We stop thinking that a problem can be analyzed, understood and maybe solved!

And of course, all of this also has an environmental impact. Every device that gets thrown away means wasted materials, components that could have kept working, or at least been recovered and one more object being replaced instead of understood. I started getting seriously into consoles and computers during the Covid period and everything began from there. Slowly this passion became a collection, then a way to learn and eventually also a way to save, or at least try to save lol, electronics that would otherwise be thrown away just because they were not working.

And if today I can keep expanding this collection, buying new pieces to repair, experimenting and bringing you new content about these devices, it is also thanks to you 🧡

Your support allows me to keep searching for interesting objects, recovering them, studying them, repairing them when possible and adding them to my collection.Thank you so much for your support💚(In the pics, you can see me with a very dusty HB-75B🧹)