The earliest pieces were written on an Amstrad word processor and stored on the low-capacity 3-inch floppy disks peculiar to the marque. These I chucked out years back when moving office. So disinterring these words has meant unearthing yellowing cuttings and scanning them, column by fuzzy column. Which is why there are not very many yet. But more will gradually arrive.

This was a time before email. Often I would dictate articles to copy-takers, which could lead to some amusing errors. Then I got a modem with a speed of 2400 (state of the art, in 1987) in an aluminium box that was the size of the average hardback novel. With this I connected my puny Amstrad to the mighty News International mainframe computer (itself perhaps the power of an average PC today, since it was forever running out of storage space) and squirted my copy, very slowly, down the line.

Stranger by far than the technology of the time, however, was the architectural period I was living through. Late postmodernism, I suppose. Also - in Britain, at least - a time of huge architectural uncertainty and navel-gazing, even before the blundering interventions of Prince Charles. Things started to get better around 1992. Still: interesting times.

• 1979: Arts and Crafts in Britain and America: escape from the Winter of Discontent full article
• 1980: The Whitney Museum repulses Norman Foster's first assault on New York full article
• 1989: Frank Gehry goes international: the Vitra Design Museum full article
• 1987: Venturi arrives in London full article
• 1991: Venturi completes the National Gallery full article
• 1991: James Stirling is unleashed on London full article