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 …
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..
Should the need for a false-flag revenge strike arise, there's an instruction manual on that here.
Nobody so far has admitted to hoarding serial cables.
Does nobody remember the halcyon days when with an Interfaker, a roll of ribbon cable, a box of assorted size male and female connectors and a soldering iron you could rule the world?
I am still awaiting the call. Box(es) of the stuff.
"Nobody so far has admitted to hoarding serial cables."
Out of my 64 x 35 litre storage boxes lining the garage wall - one box is full of serial and parallel cables. Plus the various permutations of RS232/ISO2110 DB type plugs and sockets to do all manner of reversals, crossovers, emulations, loopbacks, gender changes and 25-9 pin conversions. Probably a breakout box in there as well.
I've an upgraded PCW8256. I tried it recently and the screen lit up. I'm not sure I tried the right CP/M floppy. Surely it should still go?
I took it in a soft bag to NY once for a demo. Works on 110. Irish customs seized it on return till I faxed them the Irish receipt.
iPhone 3GS - charged and connected to wifi for old times sake
iPhone 4S - ditto (still used for Find My iPhone checks of missing family members)
Original iPad - ditto
Blackberry Playbook - ditto (still beeps for email)
MS Surface 2 (RT OS) - ditto (still very useful)
Windows Phone - ditto(lights up for FB Messages)
Several Sony PSPs - ditto
It goes on and on, dozens of them.
If my early-1980s Tandy Radio Shack Color Computers had wifi, they'd be online as well.
Ah, the Iomega ZIP drive ... I remember that, the vast, vast portable storage space! Had one of those for ... well, a very long time after I used it for anything.
I had a no name Taiwanese laptop from the 90s until I think 2012. Could only bear to get rid of it when it wouldn't power up anymore. To get the CDROM in it to even sort of work in Linux (in the 90s), I had to guess at memory addresses and tell a seemingly random CDROM driver to use them. Those were the days ...
The many 5.25 and 3.5 floppies I have from the 1980s/90s are still readable today, whereas several CDs I burnt in the noughties now give read errors or won't mount at all. I like the robustness and reliability of old kit. The 486 which houses the 5.25 drive and two IDE hard disks running DOS and Win 3.11 is still going strong, although it could do with a new CMOS battery to save having to enter the date & time whenever it's powered up (not often!). I keep it for running old games and other stuff which works best on real hardware. It came in useful a few years ago when a colleage needed to retrieve some software from 5.25 disks.
Writeable CDs and DVDs are not as long lasting as Flash. The dye fades. You can kill them in days to months left on a windowsill. Pressed ones are OK though the reflective layer might corrode.
An old HDD powered down beats tape, which beats Flash which beats dye based writeable CD /DVD.
The MO disks might be good for long life, last 3.5" size was maybe 250M? Far better than the rubbish ZIP drives.
"...rubbish ZIP drives"
I have an IDE ZIP drive (built in to a PC) and a portable one that connects via the parallel port. Neither have given trouble (no click of death) and the few 100MB disks I have, again, are still readable. Admittedly, I haven't made much use of ZIP but it did come in handy recently. I have an ancient laptop running NT4 which contained some data I wanted to move and using the portable ZIP drive on the printer port was the only way to do it. Would have been impractical using 3.5 floppies, there was no USB port and network access was not possible for other reasons.
"An old HDD powered down beats tape, [...]"
I used to keep hibernated drives in an office cupboard. When I retired I cleared the cupboard and tried to erase the disks. A couple of relatively new ones would no longer power up - so had to be taken apart and the platters physically wrecked beyond redemption. The whole lot was then considered clean enough for the security department to take away and finally destroy.
I put all my old tech out on the sidewalk. When the day comes that it's needed, somebody else can dig it out of their closet.
The trick is, of course, to dump everything related at once. Dump the floppy drive after the floppies are copied. Dump the USB 1 cables and the USB 1 devices together. It guarantees I won't be the one needing the legacy tech back.
I didn't mention the Atari 520 (or is it a 1040?) STE in the loft somewhere with 4 Mb memory which was scrapped from Sun workstations, an externat HDD (8") in a box the size of a stack stereo component (I think the drive was ESDI) plus colour and mono screens, games and office utilities (I learned spreadsheets on a Lotus 123-alike. Backwards compatability means the commands still work today), plus a Lego compatible robotics kit and a load of Lego (which may well be worth more than the computer). Oh, and somewhere there is a dot matrix printer to go with it.
I'm scared to fire it all up in case it doesn't work.
Oh, and on a non-computing front I had rickets as a kid (blame rationing) so my parents bought a sun ray lamp. Still in the loft. Works by creating a mercury arc light with real mercury. Puddles of it. Looking at the wiring I would be reluctant to fire (!) it up now but it is still a bit of awesome technology.
I’ve got lots of the stuff already mentioned (Zip drives, SCSI, ISA cards) but also “rare” software that will obviously be “very valuable” one day... Lotus Improv anyone, floppies and manuals? Or Borland Quattro Pro for the more prosaic among you?
Tip of the day - I thinned down my huge collection of PC mags by ruthlessly pruning down to just one from each year, thereby giving me just a little stack a couple of feet high.
Roopee, good point bring up the hoarding of software.
I used some stacks of 15-20 year old software boxes found in the office to build my first standing desk ... the boss then bought me a real standing desk, not seeming to appreciate the aesthetic appeal of my creation ...
I always feel guilty about throwing old but perfectly functional stuff away. Trouble is that it's worthless and no one else wants it either so like everyone else end up with a whole heap of useless crap.
I did at least throw away my collection of ISA/MCA/AGP cards along with the big box of memory a few years ago.
Thankfully I had no one calling on me for an ISA parallel port card shortly afterwards.
My memory has been jogged - someone made a business of using old kit years ago.
In the 1970s I worked for a company who used both analogue and digital technologies. As we moved over to digital the analogue machines were retired but the companies who bought our (geophysical) data sometimes wanted it reprocessed using the latest techniques. Of course, they had the original analogue recordings which we could no longer read, having disposed of the old equipment. The recordings were on magnetic tape and some were in a strange format, like 6-inches wide and a yard long. We had to send them to another company who must have bought many of the obsolete machines knowing there would be a market for these conversions of old media to digital.
Old synthesizers may be able to absorb some of your old SCSI kit
One of my regularly used synthesizers is a Kurzweil K2000 circa mid 90's that has a floppy drive built in to read some of the sound banks and to store sequences (I think). It also has a narrow SCSI port on the back so you can attach a hard drive to it or maybe even a zip drive.
I have others that take older memory cards (come to think of it, camera folks may be interested in those too).
I think the problem with the SCSI stuff is that your mind says "I know I paid $200 for that damn six device cable back in the day so it must still be worth something to someone somewhere."
I had a bucket of BNC T connectors on my desk at work a few years ago so I made a giant T-Rex out of them, maybe we can turn our junk into modern art.
Confession time.
Other than a stack of old useless PC's and about 10 paper boxes full of miscellaneous cables and cards my collection includes;
- Commodore 64, 1702 monitor, 2 x1541 drives, a hundred 5 1/4 disks of games and a dataset; come to think of it I have a 128 as well. Both of these would make good retro synthesizers...if I ever dig them out and set them up.
- a Tandy Intellivision knock off
- an original Atari
- my 486dx2 and the 14" CRT that came with it
- Original NES
- boxes of vacuum tubes, and not the good useful amplifier kind either...
- Install disks for Windows 3.1 through to Windows 10..I think I liked 3.1 better
- Dozens of hard drives from 300MB on up...I will eventually harvest the magnets and toss these thinking I am not wasting them by taking out a useful part at least.
- many many old IT books from programming assembler on said Commodore to TCP/IP for Dummies (like me apparently), to Metaframe Xp and Windows Xp (maybe I can heat my house with these?)
- Original boxes for many of these things, just to make sure they take up even more space
- Video game boxes for PC, most of the games I have on Steam now and do not need the boxes or the media, but I keep them just in case...you know....umm...REASONS!
I won't tell you about the old/useless car parts I have in the garage...that is a much longer list, though keeping several Haynes manuals for modern vehicles such the Pontiac Fiero or Dodge Omni are sure to come in handy some day....right?
If you want to use an old sampler/synth and the floppy drive has died, I can thoroughly recommend the HxC floppy to SD card emulator : https://hxc2001.com/.
Alternatively on the cheaper end, buy a Gotex emulator followed by the revised HxC firmware.
For narrow scsi, there's SCSI2SD. Above that, there's Acard, at a considerably higher price.
"The discrete components and hand-wired memory toroids have pretty colours and an aesthetic layout."
Great idea. I always fancied the having the control panel of an IBM System 360 (about the same vintage as me) as a wall decoration, but haven't found one so far. However, I have inherited some of my late father in law's vintage electronic components which are much more photogenic (above-mentioned pretty colours, etc.) than modern ones. Might get the macro lens out one of these days and photograph them.
Got the odd Powerbank or two? Don't throw them away - they make ideal Christmas presents.
OK, I am guilty of almost every behaviour identified in previous posts, and possibly some quirky ones of my own. But I will make a case for keeping SOME old kit. For example, I have an old Minolta 35 mm film scanner, for which Windows support was dropped around Vista time. However, it is recognised by Mint 18 and still works perfectly well. It is probably far better built than most modern equivalents costing £00s to £000s. Why throw out anything that still works? Linux OS seems to have a remarkable ability to breathe new life into (some) old kit.
OK, so I am Scottish and traditionally tight fisted, but it is my money.
Psychologically it's probably the investment factor that stops us throwing old kit out. It's pretty well established that we value losses higher than gains*. So we're more averse to writing-off value. That kit represents considerable investment and we don't want to admit that it's gone into the black hole of "progress".
*https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-loss-aversion/
I still have some really old gear I've had for 30+ years and it wasn't new then,but it still works so who cares. CB radios modified to go on 10m amateur bands, a baycom I built (diy ax25 packet radio modem), a CF era ipaq running familiar linux with the CF jacket, my nokia 9000i's, zx81 and onwards computer stuff, a couple of 47u racks that I need to clean the really obsolete stuff out the way in (pix's, 10bt baynetworks switching gear, some terminal servers that are AUI with aui adaptors, some sparc's, netras, disk shelves, scsi crosspoint switches, lto drives and all sorts).
But... I live somewhere where property is dirt cheap, and it all just lives in a spare house in the garden, and I do genuinely need things out of there from time to time when tinkering, so its not eating anything, on the really rare occasion someone does need some legacy hardware its there, or available to power up and test something, and its not harming any kittens. Some of its so old now its attained curio status (the double height mfm hard disks that I use as door stops for instance, and the aformentioned nokia 9000i's etc). I'll just wait until its worth my time to ebay then sell it off now :-)
Hoarder? more like just can't be bothered going through it all :)
It is not the value of the old kit that is the reason you keep it, it is that you once needed that stuff and it has been used to save your neck 'many a time and oft'.
Once it was leading edge or just a very clever way to solve a problem.
Now after the passage of time you feel it is 'wrong' to discard it in a skip like an old banana skin.
It deserves to be useful one more time ...... so you lovingly 'file' it with your other old kit, waiting for that day when it can be useful once again. [Wiping away a fond tear ..... ;)]
Often old but affordable and decent electronic test equipment like spectrum analysers uses old computer technology. IDE drives, floppies, 30 pin RAM, parallel printers etc. You want the equipment to work, you need to maintain the old stuff. It is not possible to upgrade.
That camcorder story actually happened to me, a month ago, except that I was both the hoarder, and the bunch of colleagues. I was trying to think of a way to give away a Sony Handycam, when I discovered that I had numerous cassettes dating back to 1998. So I got them all on hard disk, and all it took was buying a new battery (I bought 2, just in case) with a charger, and a Firewire 400 to 800 adapter, and a Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt adapter, and external storage (spinning rust, of course), and software to make it easier.... Sigh. Instead of de-hoarding, I added more.
A while back I decided I had too much useless stuff and had a big clear out. I regret it daily. So much irreplaceable, interesting old hardware, gone like leaves in the wind... Never again.
Regarding floppy drives: I am, for my sins, the Debian maintainer for ufiformat, the magic tool which you need to format disks in external floppy drives (no, fdformat doesn't work). And just to prove me real hardcore credentials, I have just built a floppy drive controller to allow me to read exotic disk formats, such as the weird-arse 256-bytes-per-sector GCR encoding used by Brother integrated word processors. Fun stuff.
I have several PCI-bus Token Ring adaptors.
Oh, and one of those hub things that the "hermaphroditic" connectors go into.
They were only known by their IBM four-digit machine number iirc, and I am too lazy to go up to the loft and see what it was. But those readers of a similar vintage may remember...
Oh, I suppose I don't really need those dozen or so 386/486 laptops...though I still might trash out the motherboards and build a bunch of Pi laptops instead from the old keyboards and screens. But I'll keep the DG1 and someday I'll restore it. Promise. And what about my 5 1/2 inch floppies, complete with drives for my Autocad 11 with two drawing tablets? And yes, I do have a couple of 3 1/2" external floppy drives, one internal for my Win98 SE (for my music synth an MIDI) software, still useful, and one external for my IBM (before it was Lenovo) and several hundred floppies including systems backup for my win95. Then there's my 8-track desktop with several dozen 80's vintage tapes and my CoCo II with the assembler cartridge. Pity they wouldn't let me keep my IBM 360 to heat the house. The 4-channel stereo, the pair of 386 motherboards...They'll pry my 12500 internal modem out of my cold dead hands! Oh, and my 1922 Sears Neutrodyne, with the horn speaker. And those dozen or so books on obsolete software--the basic principles are still valid!
Well, off to my bedroom in the garage. TTFN.
Otherwise it's the back seat of the car parked outside - or a tent.
It was when I pitched the second tent in the yard that they came for me, and took me off to the happy place.
The psychologist quickly diagnosed my problem, too tense!
[Thank God for the mask of anonymity, for the PUNishment could be more than I can bear!]
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