Has the internet potentially shortened your watch collecting longevity?

Well, without the internet, I would still be wearing disposable quartz sports watches and I certainly would not have a wife giving me the stink eye whenever watches, audio gear, records/cd’s are discussed. My doom scrolling would be done via print media. That said overall I think the internet is mostly a good thing by connecting people and information. Perhaps it can be a bit like a sugar high though when it comes to pouring gas on the collecting fire.

Welcome to the hive mind. I believe one needs to maintain a sense of distance and self interest to avoid such feelings.

There was a cartoon somewhere that basically noted that we have a device in our pockets with all the world's knowledge and we use it to look at pictures of cats.

It kindof depends. It is amazing that you can type any obscure question and someone has an answer. "How do I change the ignition module on a 1988 VW Vanagon?" 13 videos and 50 posts in random sites. The internet has helped me fix a lot of cars and do a lot of plumbing projects.

Overall, I don't miss the days when i had to wait for a college catalogue to come in the mail to try to decide where to go for school, or picking up free pennysavers to search for a used bike near me or try to find an apartment.

The downside for me is less of the loss of satisfaction and more the compulsive need to keep digging.

The nice thing about watches is that there is so much to learn or to try to find answers for. The internet does not hinder that for me or take away the satisfaction of finding answers. The negative is that it exposes me to so many different watches that it's overwhelming and I sometimes miss the time when I had one Speedmaster and was blissfully content in my uninformed state.

I took an 18 or so year break from active watch collecting.

It does seem like 30 or so years ago there was much more social interaction. One learned things by word of mouth. Not entirely internet free. I had access to Modems and such starting in the mid to late 1970s. By the Mid 1980s BBSs and email lists existed. So one could connect with people in different time zones and continents.

I used to collect a lot of paper/ ephemera. Still have a large if dated Library. Some of the rare books were expensive. Much of this has been scanned and placed online. Nowadays more of it seems to be behind a paywall or other gated community. Back then sometimes one could get the curator of the BHI to go into the attic and send missing back issues to mostly complete 50 years of a trade publication.

Estate dealers would send out beautifully printed catalogs of rare technical books. And one could find the darnedest things at doll collecting shows relating to clockwork automata and indirectly watches. These books can (and may still be) expensive. One book lists for Over 2000USD or SFR. Only 200 were printed . I was loaned a copy by the library inter loan. I did return it. After I had photographed and photocopied all the pages. Some things came of microfiche. Which I may still have somewhere. There are reprints, but the original printing plates were lost and the reprints not much better than my film copies.

Not all of this is available online. Much has been scanned by better means than what I did. Yet it remains subject to copyright. If the copyright is obscure. Then even Google Books will not release the digital version.

For much of the 18 years I avoided online watches. Probably as the first spam emails I got in the late 1980s and early 1990s were watch related phishing attempts. By the early 2000s there were simply to many fakes and overpriced junk to really care about.

The other shift was my mentors passed away in the early 2000s. So without a place or people to share my passion with, there was not much point in continuing to collect the watches. Meanwhile the tools rusted away.

How long this current impassioned phase will last is any guess. I have been active here a bit over a year. The passion I had in the 1990s seems to have returned. Could be that the pipe (Theater Organ) collectors is going through what the old watch guys did 20 years ago. Like in the 1950s this collecting has lost most of the value. That is a much smaller interest group. Technical information never really took hold on the net.

I was interested in film making when young and in school. So I collected film cameras. Making cartoon animated films. I took classes in theater. I found film cameras and cine projectors also interesting as the watches. I could see the writing on the wall that if animation was to survive it would have to be done by computer. So I became interested in language parsing and compiler design. Not to mention embedded micro control systems.

It is difficult to separate pre and post internet stuff given that I was aware of it in the 1970s. I was an early adopter of digital image processing and photography. In college I joined Sigraph. So was well aware of synthetic image generation and digitizing of film. Even using the plotter in the physics department to assist in the creation my animated student film in 1980. I got interested in film and paper transport systems. When the Macintosh came out in 1984 I was moonlighting cleaning KEM film editing machines.

The Macintosh changed everything. It could even do rudimentary animation. Fast forward 40 years!

I still have a lot of data from back then. Transcripts of old Usenet groups and such. Zipped and compressed in obscure cryptically named files. Sometimes I attempt to see what is in these folders. It is always the lost data or image one desires more than the others. When I do look at the old chat transcripts they seem odd and I wonder why I saved them. Or the many revisions of the programs what read the data.

This was supposed to be a case study of something called a PCD Film scanner 2000. I was blogging this when I found OF last year. I got one of these in 2020, as that is when I started doing online surplus shopping as the brick and motor surplus stores were failing. And probably would have failed anyway. Based on my search history I may have bought the last 'PCS film scanner 2000.' The store I purchased it from has been out of stock for three years.

Every few months I put this search term in google. Kodak leased these. Only 100 or so were ever made. Most of them were destroyed. Perhaps half a dozen may still survive. Most of the online data is from others looking for more info. They probably gave up. Kodak went out of business.

Then things got nasty. Aggregator phishing sites started offering the desired manual behind a paywall. Even showing what looked like a blurred version of the document and supposed text excerpts culled from other websites including my own. I even got a prepaid gift card to see if I could buy the manual. The card was only good for US purchases so was declined. The help chat bot never heard of a 'PCD Film scanner 2000.' The burner email I used then became full of really nasty phishing spam even regurgitating the burner password.

I did however hear from 3 other people. One had some of the driver software, what was stored using the wrong archival format and corrupted. Another had the service manuals, and the third after a year sent me the missing part. None of them have responded to any follow emails in the last year.

So the net has become almost useless for finding obscure technical information. Unless one is lucky enough to find an honest site like this one. Most of these special interest groups went to Fadbook when Yahoo shut down. There was a successor listserv but the users abandoned it as they wanted to charge for what had been free. I do not have a personal Fadbook account, but do look at the family account from time to time. Most of what I see is socially engineered to be distracting and enticing.

Even Instagram and Twitter (X) <- see how Elon social engineered me. Have become useless. I used to tweet Mariner 9 stuff. Now what is the point? It is simply shouting in the wind. (which I am probably doing here, but the UI here is much better.)

What really irks me though is the amount of video. Now I do not mind the occasional You tube. On the other hand when I want to read an in depth BBC world news article, and I get served a loud shouty video aimed at the illiterate. I become frustrated. Which seems to be the goal of a lot of this. To keep the viewers engaged and wanting more.

The promise of finding that missing piece which may or may not exist.