We've had the ongoing debate of "build a ZX-81 kit or leave it in the box",
but one aspect of classic kit building I have a question for the group
about is, what about stuff that we built ourselves 10+ years ago that
still works, but might need some touch-up. Specifically, I have several
things (a TVT-6, a Cosmac Elf, a homemade arcade button panel for playing
Space Invaders on a PET, a 2-char LED display for the PET, etc.) that
I made when I was a teenager. They still work, so it's not a question of
repair. It's an aesthetic thing - my soldering skills were much poorer
when I was 13. I'm debating re-soldering these items (and risking breaking
them) or leaving them the way they are a) because if it works, don't
screw with it, and b) it's a snapshot of my own context in the greater
historical framework.
I took history and archaeology in school; I have a strong aversion to
modernizing artifacts. When restoring pots, statues, mosaics, etc.,
an archaeologist tries to never restore an antiquity in a way that can't
be reversed (they use water-soluable glue made from fish scales to move
mosaic fragments, for example). Also, when modern materials are used, no
attempt to make it resemble the ancient material is made - quite the
opposite - it's plainly and intentionally modern looking so ever a
casual observer can't mistake it for the missing original. When my
advisor restored the bed of a large monochrome mosaic near Isthmia, he
threw several modern coins into the concrete bed so that future
excavators would know that it wasn't ancient concrete.
So re-soldering my TVT-6 makes it look nice, but dilutes the fact that
it was originally built in the 1970s, just as much as using modern
ICs does. Do people have an opinion about this? Am I just stuck on
the horns of a false dilemma?
-ethan
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Received on Thu Oct 04 2001 - 22:17:22 BST