[Uncle Bulgaria]

I certainly don't have more than a few books and sheets dedicated to specific things. Being an architect not anything to do with electronics or engineering. However, I do think the Internet is not anything like an archive. There is such a large logistical framework that has to be always on, that (especially in the future I think we're likely to have) it cannot stay up forever. Formats also change - how many things stored with delight on early computers are now lost from being unreadable?

There is also a psychological aspect to books that is entirely lost on the computer. For example, I'm reading Ernst Juenger's Paris journals at the moment and wanted to quote an entry in a letter. There was no way I'd remember it from the date of the journal entry, but the muscle memory of which page it was on and the relative thicknesses of each half of the open book meant I found it in a few hundred pages almost immediately. The information wouldn't have been online, and would have necessitated a number of searches to find the right keywords even if it were.

In that sense, as an earlier poster remarked, we are custodians! However, there are museums as Pamphonica says, and they have the space and the dedication to conserve these things. On an individual level I go with William Morris and his famous axiom.

Conundrum: of course all those electronics ARE beautiful AND useful!