State of the art in 1973 
I just found this polaroid of a chip I made back in 1973 at GEC Hirst Research Centre in London. I still have some of the chips somewhere. It’s a 16×16 array of Ge-Te chalcogenide glass ‘bits’ that could be used as switches or storage. We were using them to control early LCD panels.
Most of the contents are from the same period as the wallet, 1975-78, but there are some from 1967, a relationship in Blackpool and letters after it, a medical card from the 60s, and some from other times in the 70s. I had intended to sort them out into neat piles, put them in separate drawers, ignore the boring humdrum everyday ones, then I remembered Perec!
I began to think about entropy and time too. On Saturday I opened the box (a sort of ordered way of treating the contents), took out two plastic bags stuffed with letters, etc., put them out on the table in no particular order and looked at whatever caught my eye.
I began to sort the contents – then stopped. I had read a few letters and begun to sort them… then stopped to think about what this whole box of stuff encompassed and what it meant on different levels.
