back to article My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Internal hard drives with dust, fluff and shit on. Bundles of CAT5 all tangled like string. These are some of my least favourite things. Regular readers will know that I have banged on before about our shared tendency to hoard bits of hardware that we don't need. That is, we don't …

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    1. katrinab Silver badge

      Re: I feel the need...

      Yes, I do that too. And what happens is that just after buying it, it somehow magically appears at the top of the box of stuff.

  1. Keith Oborn

    Kind of sweet--

    That Melinda Gates, of all people, has an Apple III as a favourite bit of junk. Has she told Bill?

    As for stuff that might be of some historic interest, in the UK try the National Museum of Computing. In California, the Computer History Museum. There are lots of others--.

  2. Steve Button Silver badge

    she'd never allow an Apple product to cross her threshold?

    That's because it says IN the house.

    1. tfewster

      Re: she'd never allow an Apple product to cross her threshold?

      So she can't throw it out, as that would require it to cross the threshold.

  3. Semtex451

    It's nice when we have these group therapy sessions, they help.

    When is it beer time?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My parents asked me to get the data off a floppy disk recently.

    A 3.5" floppy, specifically. Which is really ironic, as I have a functioning 5.25" floppy drive (connected via a FC5025 controller), but the 3.5" drive isn't plugged into anything. I really need to try plugging the 3.5" drive into the FC5025 to see if it'll work, otherwise I may need to acquire a USB floppy drive.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: My parents asked me to get the data off a floppy disk recently.

      Try a library computer if they're still open, they've probably got ancient kit.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: My parents asked me to get the data off a floppy disk recently.

      "[...] otherwise I may need to acquire a USB floppy drive."

      You may find that a USB 3.5" floppy cannot be reconfigured for non-DOS sector/track permutations - which the old PC internal ones could handle.

      Even worse is when a relative produces an old Amstrad word processor 3" floppy to be read. No one has ever asked to retrieve data off a "magnetic bubble floppy" that one home computer (Sharp?) used.

  5. Andrew Ed

    Anyone need an old RLL hard drive?

    Or a boxed PC Task emulator for the Amiga with original dos 6 and Windows 286 (german) disks ? I am unlikely to use them unless I run UAE on modern hardware and want to run PC Task on UAE to see it still faster than my accelerated Amiga.

    As for usb floppies I bought one two years ago soley to rebuild a Toshiba Portege It was the only way possible until I got Plop boot manager installed!

  6. Havoc

    I got rid of the Sparcstation IPX but still have SCSI cables, HD's, DAT backup and even an external LTO somewhere. Box of ISA cards, even a radio card, box of PCI cards probably even a motherboard cpu and ram to use them in. And in a far away box in the garage some twinax, a 8" floppy, punch card gauges and one of those metal ribbons with characters on for a printer. I case you need a Pentium Pro, slot 1 pentium or 286 chip I have it covered.

    Oh, and I'm single...

  7. oiseau
    Happy

    Thank you !!!

    Hello:

    Experience has proven time and time again that within a week of ditching ...

    ... so often that I can no longer attribute the phenomenon to coincidence.

    I must confess that I'm not a huge fan of your column but I always read it.

    That said, I have to say that with today's piece you've made my day.

    All these years I've been thinking it was just me.

    Have a beer ----->

    Cheers and a very good week-end to you.

    O.

    1. Alistair Dabbs

      Re: Thank you !!!

      >> I must confess that I'm not a huge fan of your column but I always read it.

      I think I've spotted what you're doing wrong here.

    2. Martin
      Happy

      Re: Thank you !!!

      Experience has proven time and time again that within a week of ditching ...

      ... so often that I can no longer attribute the phenomenon to coincidence.

      This is just a variant of the fact that they ALWAYS try to deliver a parcel to your house in the ten minutes when you pop out to buy the paper. I sometimes wonder if they are waiting round the corner until I go out.

      It's a standard phenomenon, commonly known as Life's A Bitch.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Thank you !!!

        "It's a standard phenomenon, commonly known as Life's A Bitch."

        I recently waited for an urgent parcel to arrive. It was supposed to be "next day" and was already a day late. The seller had sent it "48" in spite of me paying a hefty premium for "24". The Royal Mail tracking said it was now "out for delivery". Then at lunch time the tracking said "could not deliver - no answer - card left".

        No card! Sorting office said it probably wouldn't be on their shelves until the next day. Luckily it was there on a second visit in the evening.

        The following day the next door neighbour gave me the RM "not in" card. The post person had filled in my name and the correct address on the RM "not in" card - but had been trying to deliver to next door.

        The house numbers are 49 and 51. I have the number "51" in large white numerals on the wall by the door. The neighbours have "49" in brass numerals adjacent to their white door's letterbox.

  8. Chris Evans

    The Retro market is big!

    Quite a bit of our sales are 20-35 year old BBC/RISC OS etc kit. Just sold yesterday a BBC micro with no disc interface! I'm on the lookout for old network hubs with 10b2 (BNC) and RJ45. Network intetfaces for some early RISC OS kit are now rare but I have some old but unused 10base2 interfaces that could be used if I can track down some suitable hubs to allow connection to a modern network.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The Retro market is big!

      Do you have a site that we can notify what we might have? Certainly still have 10base2 bits in my spares that will probably never be needed again - even possibly some 10base5 AUI to UTP.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The Retro market is big!

      May also have something. WHere can you be reached? Or via El Reg?

    3. Olivier2553

      Re: The Retro market is big!

      I have such hubs, a couple of them, 1xBNC 8xRJ45.

      I could send, but I don't know if they still work, nor have I power supply.

      I used to have media converter in all sort of fashion AUI/BNC/RJ45, but those I ditched them few years ago.

  9. alanturingslefteyebrow

    Several boxes of DD 5.25" floppies. I'm sure I'll need them one day.

  10. Fading
    Boffin

    IT kit hoarding confessionals...

    Please forgive me Sys admin for I have sinned.....

    I have allowed my spare DDR sticks to be removed to the recyclers with nary a complaint, my 8086 powered Amstrad 1640 is no longer in my possession and I have had foul thoughts about allowing my 486DX2 to go the way of the ebay....

  11. Terry 6 Silver badge

    assuming you know what it is

    Less a problem with electronic boxes. But LEADS!!

    I have a whole tangle* of leads that I might need for a camera or something. I haven't any idea what they are actually for or if I can dump them. Because the manufacturer of the unknown device used a non-standard, but unbadged lead. I have no idea what the were/are for until I find a device with a nonstandard connection and have to play match the plug then extract the lead from the tangle.

    *It's one of those unexplored laws of nature. Place two or more cables in a dark, isolated space and leave them undisturbed for more than a week.and they will form an impenetrable tangle.

    1. alanturingslefteyebrow

      Re: assuming you know what it is

      Bag of cheap velcro ties from eBay will sort that problem out.

      1. #define INFINITY -1

        Re: assuming you know what it is

        Just hoard the twist tie cables you get with everything.

        Actually I've made good use of junk. Wombles weren't anything to jeer at.

        (Have a box of HP calculators--working--that I 'inherited', which you will pry out of my cold... etc)

      2. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: assuming you know what it is

        I actually have a Brother labeller. Very useful for the assorted plugs that work my fish tank*. But it's too late for that to be used on the device leads now. And the next time I identify and use one I'll be in too much of a hurry to put a nice label on. At least, I'll be in a hurry by the time I've identified it and extracted it.

        * pump, filter, front LED, rear LED, heater

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: assuming you know what it is

          "And the next time I identify and use one I'll be in too much of a hurry to put a nice label on."

          White or yellow electrical tape and a permanent marker pen*** is quick.

          ***assuming you can remember where you left them.

    2. Bowlers

      Re: assuming you know what it is

      "*It's one of those unexplored laws of nature. Place two or more cables in a dark, isolated space and leave them undisturbed for more than a week.and they will form an impenetrable tangle."

      Sorting through my cable collection I found a Parallel to SCSI cable which must have been bred in there as I knew nothing about it. What could it have been used for, truly a bastard cable?

      1. That Badger

        Re: assuming you know what it is

        That's an Apple MacIntosh DB25 SCSI connector. It was probably hooked up to a scanner at one point.

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: assuming you know what it is

      "leave them undisturbed for more than a week.and they will form an impenetrable tangle"

      I've explained this before. It's how they breed. You know it's true because there are always more than you started with except for the one you were looking for which has been divorced and left the family home.

  12. Matthew Anderson

    Yes! I brought out a large plastic box of junk hardware just a few days ago, stared at the external floppy drive, considered my options for a few minutes and placed it back in the box for storage.... To be reopened again in a few years time to repeat the same procedure.... I also have a boxed Amstrad 1640 in my garage taking up a considerable amount of room which I cannot persuade myself to get rid of, as well as 6 towers ranging from a 286 up to pentiums and a plethora of laptops in various states of disrepair. Phones and tablets going back at least 10 years also, plus their bloody chargers... Plus various ancient monitors in my attic...

    One day I may get angry enough to ditch some of it. :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "One day I may get angry enough to ditch some of it. :)"

      The worse after-effect emotion is the nagging suspicion that you should have kept it. Reinforced when you find a need for it.

      Doing my Halloween decorations - several times I found something in my spares going back decades that solved a problem. Some of the things were pure serendipity and had been forgotten - even more rewarding when they had originally been "wrong" buys.

  13. jonesthechip
    Go

    Useful Legacy Kit

    Well, there's an intel intellec 4 MOD 40 (1975 vintage) in the garage that only needs the 1702A boot/monitor EEPROMS re-reprogramming. I do wish I hadn't binned the ASR33 TeleType all those years ago. And I'm sure that the pair of Series III intellecs MDS dev systems (1981 vintage) will come in useful again some day. (If the wife doesn't find out that the important storage boxes marked 'DO NOT THROW AWAY' actually contain 8" floppy discs...)

  14. spold Silver badge

    Top you all with a Science of Cambridge (Sinclair) MK14 Microprocessor Development Kit

    The membrane keyboard must be the most useless piece of computer hardware ever - even when it was new.

    If you have a cassette recorder still you can even keep your programs (on months without an "R" and no rain and the processor aligned with a chicken).

  15. Herring`

    I have

    a T800 Transputer board - connects to a PC via an 8 bit ISA slot. One day it might be valuable.

    1. hammarbtyp

      Re: I have

      Got a couple of those plus a hitachi H8 processor board which i won in a competition (Lucky me!). just waiting for the correct offer

    2. oiseau
      Happy

      Re: I have

      Hello:

      I still have my home made set of serial/parallel loopback plugs and a few of these cables in various stages of completion/repair. I was so happy when I made them (1995?), can't bear to do away with that kit.

      I also have (and frequently use) a Umax S-6E SCSI-1 scanner that runs off an Adaptec AHA2940UW inside my Sun Ultra24 workstation which I was able to fit with a female Centronics 50 rigged from the inside and an active terminator with LEDS and all (I recall it cost me a good sum) on the scanner.

      A fully working Palm IIIxe syncs through a craddle hooked up to an internal serial port header I discovered on the workstation's motherboard but I'll be gutting a PL2303 Serial/USB adapter to hack it inside the craddle so it won't interfere when I upload data from my serial port temperature datalogger. All under Linux with FOSS, of course.

      There's also a perfectly working external Sun DDS-2 DAT drive that runs off the same Adaptec card and a box of sealed/unused tapes for which, to my chagrin, have no real use these days.

      Much younger is my Asus 1000HE which almost 10 years later still works like a charm, original 250Gb drive and all.

      Cheers,

      O.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Legitimate business expense

    If you are hanging on to kit because you think a client might want it, just get a storage unit and charge it your business. Then at least you can see how much your quirk costs you.

    Having cleared out my parents home , and then their flat as we had to move them to a care home , honestly all that stuff we have that we think is precious, in the end it is just stuff. No one wants your Bond video box set or your video camera. 99.9% of it is just junk. You can charity shop some, recycle some, even ebay a little, but most just ends up in a skip. The stuff we have kept are a selection of photo albums and cine films.

    But you know the one thing I couldn't find and really wanted? My Irish grandfather's birth certificate. That would save me a fair bit of faffing right now.

  17. oldgreyguy

    I will thow in:

    Two Nakamichi SCSI 7 CD external drives

    One Seagate full height SCSI external drive with cable and Adaptec 1540 adapter

    and a Teac (i think) dual 3.5/5.25 floppy drive... with cables

  18. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    I have so much old stuff..

    Most recently I re-used a mini PCI card to provide a second hand firewall off ebay with wireless access point capability (buying a new PCEngines firewall is a tad pricey..)

    I keep a load of old systems to play old games and fiddle around with multi-platform Unix. One of my best purchases was two SGI O2 boxes off ebay for a tenner each(!). I've thrown very little away, and a surprising amount of it has been useful. An old generic ISA graphics card worked in a pentium 3 system that had faulty onboard graphics, and was used as my firewall before I bought the embedded device.

    SCSI that works in everything from PowerMacs to PC kit (CDRW, tape, hard drives). Firewire for newer Macs, PCs, and Thinkpads. Token Ring ISA cards and an MAU. A 10Mb hub with coax connection. I can probably bin the Token Ring.

    There's a minority of completely useless stuff. The ISDN router can go, the Sparcstation 20 is too loud, hot, slow, and power hungry to bother with these days. The couple of Microchannel and Sun cards of some type, and there's nothing to plug them into.

    Also, as this is running in a home environment, noise is a factor.

    The CRTs are alive for now, but when they sadly die I suspect they'll be replaced by something 1440p TFT.

    They key has to be that it doesn't take up too much time, and there's at least one or two fully working systems you don't fiddle with.

  19. Chris Evans

    Freecycle it!

    If you can't bare to take it to the tip or the bother of ebaying it why not Freecycle it?

    https://www.freecycle.org/

    People come and take your rubbish away for you!

    1. David Roberts
      Unhappy

      Re: Freecycle it!

      Downvoted for being behind the times.

      Ten years ago I could Freegle stuff. These days nobody wants to take things away. Hurts me to throw stuff, but the effort is no longer worth it.

      1. Chris Evans

        Re: Freecycle it!

        "Downvoted for being behind the times."

        Maybe in your area, but around here it is still very effective. In the past year nearly everything I've offered (A dozen or more items) have been collected, mostly with little hassle. I've also picked up a few things. Last week I picked up an EPROM eraser I needed!

  20. ukgnome

    Might be?

    No Sir, it will be.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No Zip drive around here (I had a parallel port Zip that I tossed about three years ago, within 6 months, a friend had an urgent need to access some zip disks). I do have:

    * Mystery hard drive (SMD? has a sticker with error map on top)

    * various DAT-72 tapes (some were scratch tapes for testing, some might be dead)

    * various floppes (for backup/transfer data off of production equipment)

    * 2 Windows 95 CDs.

    * DOS 6.22/Win 3.1 installation disk set

    * Targus USB dongle with MicroSD, SD, CF, XD, and a couple more interfaces

    * many SIMMS/DIMMS

    * Windows Update Windows 98 Service Pack 1 CD ("Do Not Make Illegal Copies of This Disc")

    * USB Microsoft optical mouse (the kind with the cool red translucent plastic)

    * Belt clip for an AT&T cordless phone

    * Trident TVGA9000i-2 ISA video card

    OMG... that's just what's in my desk at work. I'm afraid to look around the shelves and cabinets, let alone my basement at home!

  22. aregross

    Along with the usual stuff already listed I still have an IBM PC Expansion box, converted to an XT.... like most of them were, with 256k of RAM and a 10MB HDD!

  23. steve 124

    you too?

    I've got so many stories just like this. I've got a closet full of old crap I'm terrified to get rid of. Maybe this will inspire me to go through it soon and at least get rid of the old rambus memory and ISA cards.

  24. gryphon

    Old Stuff

    Another hoarder.

    Somewhere in the house I have a Netware 286 ISA license key card.

    Plus the usual PSU's, cables etc. like everybody else.

    Oh, and 2 Toshiba Libretto 100CT's WITH the small and large dock AND the 32MB memory upgrade.

    I know you'll all be impressed with those. :-)

    1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Old Stuff

      Actually, yes, I am impressed by those. The 100CT packs a fair bit of power for a portable DOS machine (and other old OS) in a small space. The next best thing to that is an old Thinkpad with a dock for an ISA card.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Old Stuff

        Perhaps what is worse than having a bunch of obsolete tech is finding obsolete tech that you decide you want. I was recently working at a different location, and helped a colleague there search through some cabinets in the basement, where I found a bunch of really ancient things, one of which was a ... well sort of a laptop from the DOS days, although we don't know exactly which DOS days. This one being a rather rare machine from a manufacturer in New Zealand. I found myself wanting to take this back with me and try to get it running. Then, I remembered a few problems with that:

        1. I didn't know how the thing worked.

        2. The thing didn't have a power cable, so I'd have to make one based on the specs written on the machine.

        3. The machine had two floppy drives, at least one of which had important software. There was already a disk in both drives, but they were not labeled. Next to that was a binder containing at least a hundred more disks. There was really no telling which one had the software on it.

        4. It probably weighed ten kilos or so, and I had to fly back.

        5. Nobody had given me permission to discard this for them, although to judge from the other contents of the cabinet, they were not going to want any of it.

        It's probably still there. If I get sent there again, I might just take it this time.

  25. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
    Pint

    The Divorce Induced Clearout.

    I suspect a lot of my hoard has gone the way of the tip, if I didn't remove it on my last "pickup" run back in the summer (Including my beloved Tapwave Zodiac II's) by the Mrs Outgoing Scorn.

    I have tidied up a lot of my existing stuff, a good chunk remains to be done & I'm already being threatened with stuff heading into the bin by the new Ms Incoming Scorn who doesn't share my love of old tools, cables & bits that will come in handy one day.

    On the plus side we do have a nice very large heated garage to sort it out when we move into a new place at the end of the month, assuming she doesn't strike first with a garbage pre-emptive strike..

    1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: The Divorce Induced Clearout.

      The Tapwave Zodiac II is a deeply lovely machine, still occasionally fire it up, bought one when Morgan Computers was selling them off cheap. It'll be considerably better than the Spectrum Vega I bet

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