Since leaving Silicon Valley, I have kept up with the Mercury News online, especially for Mike Cassidy's columns which are invariably witty, wise, and wonderfully written.

By coincidence his latest, posted 3rd May, tackles the tech nostalgia redolent of my two previous postings. It is about ancient antennae, and the man who loves them.

You can read Cassidy's column at http://www.mercurynews.com, but here is an extract from this lovely poetic piece of journalism:

"Sometimes the past gives way stubbornly.

Sometimes it takes muscle, Liquid Wrench, cussing and more Liquid Wrench. Sometimes it takes Dave Aronovitz, a man who provides palliative care for the artifacts of a fading, if not dying, form of communication.

Aronovitz is a self-made expert in the art of disassembling the soaring steel towers that support home-based ham radio antennae. Today he is 35 feet up in the air, harnessed to a tower working like a dog to tear it down. The Menlo Park house to which it is attached is going on the market and the real estate agent says the homely steel structure is a curb-appeal crusher".

"...Back on the ground for a break, Aronovitz tells his radio story. Bought his first back in 1956 at the local Radio Shack. A Hallicrafter SX 99. Saved for an eternity, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, working at the grocery for 90 cents an hour.

"All for those nights as a 12-year-old in the basement of his Massachusetts home. Tubes glowing. The hum, static and whistle of the set.

"``There is something about those old analog radios, Aronovitz, 60, says, ``and the experience of tuning them in. '

Cassidy concludes: "And so from time to time, Aronovitz is called on to deliver us from our past. He does so stoically. A man who well understands that sometimes the past gives way stubbornly."

Cassidy's story of an amateur radio fan - laid off from tech giant, Sun, and now trawling for old sets on the net - is so much like those of the vintage computer collectors, experts in their own way, and part of technology history, whether innovators or fixers, or dismantlers of old tech landscapes.

Colosseum by Motorino