I grew up in an era when you couldn't just click a button and have something delivered to your doorstep the next day. If you needed a printer cable in 1988, you had to drive to the store and hope they had it. Or worse, order it by mail and wait 6 to 8 weeks. That's not a punchline. That was reality.
So you learned to hold onto things.
That one cable you thought you might need someday? You kept it. The RAM sticks from an old 386? Into the box. SCSI terminators? Who even remembers what those did, but I had three.
Back in Buffalo, I had a basement full of this stuff. Boxes and boxes of computer parts, power adapters, IDE ribbons, video cards, mystery dongles, you name it. When I moved to Florida, I got rid of most of it because... well, Florida doesn't have basements. (1) But now, twelve years later, it's back. The stack of spare keyboards. The bins of USB cables. The drawer labeled "HDMI - Assorted." Every time you buy a new device, it comes with a USB charging cable. But I've already got a million USB charging cables, so it goes in a box labeled "USB charging cables." (2)
Why? Because I might need them someday.
This isn't just hoarding. It's a kind of survival instinct. If you ever spent two weeks waiting for a DB-25 to Centronics cable to show up in the mail, you know that pain. Scarcity breeds preparedness. Like a Ferengi hiding gold-pressed latinum under the floorboards... except in my case, it's 14 outdated webcams and a drawer full of PS/2-to-USB adapters.
I've been thinking about boxing some of this up and turning it into a giveaway. Seriously. Once a month, I could post a "grab box" on the website. Just a bunch of tech odds and ends, maybe throw in a t-shirt or a mousepad. No cost, just enter your name and get a box of mystery geek swag. One man's junk is another man's discontinued-but-still-supported cable adapter.
I'd love to donate some of this to a place that could actually use it, but I have no idea where to take it. Thrift stores? Tech schools? Ferengi outposts? Who knows.
Anyway, if you've got ideas, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be over here, clutching my parallel port PCI card like it's a family heirloom. Because you never know.
(1) I did graduate from messy garage to message storage unit. Seems like there's a storage place every block here in Cape Coral. Oh, and car washes.
(2) And only ONE supports data transfers. Good luck finding it.
P.S. If this post sounds a little loopy, blame the hydrocodone. Oral surgery last week, tooth got infected, and now I'm riding the wave. But hey, at least I still have all my PS/2 splitter cables. Priorities.
So after I had ChatGPT create that image for me, I said, "It doesn't really look like me, but it's good enough." And it replied with:
Perfect. "Good enough" is the unofficial motto of every cable hoarder who's ever said, "I might need this someday."
Who says it doesn't have a sense of humor. LOL.
Sami Shamma
@Reply 10 months ago
I remember holding on to a box that had perhaps 30 different phone chargers. I can't remember when I finally got rid of it, but it took me a long time.
Yeah, once in a while, I'll buy something that comes with a USB-A or even USB-B cable, and I'll be like, "They still make you?"
Jeffrey Kraft
@Reply 10 months ago
Aw the era of SCSI. One of my early computers had SCSI, it was great until it wasn't! We added a Creative Sound Blaster board to the PC and that is when the trouble started. Windows wouldn't shut down correctly, the shut down sound would start and never stop. Had to unplug the PC and pray that the drive didn't get corrupted. Took the pc back to the people that built it. They couldn't solve it either. I finally asked them to try a non SCSI drive in it's place with a copy of Windows. Suddenly it behaved and we put the SCSI in as well but it wasn't the boot drive, and all were happy.
Dave Clark
@Reply 10 months ago
I remember my 1st PC was a Tandy 1000-EX VGA RGB 16 color monitor and a daisy wheel printer with a ribbon. This was before Windows, 1988ish the computer had 64k of RAM that I upgraded to 512k by ordering RAM IC Chips through that Weapon size computer catalog called "Computer Shopper". The computer came with a 5 -1/4 floppy drive 360k 1 disk would hold. The next Radio Shack New Years day sale had a 3-1/2 floppy 720k on sale from $199.95 to $99.95 so I hoped on that! 6 months later I added 2 10mb external hard drives in one external case huge ribbon cable. added a 150 baud serial modem that was basically good for dialing phone numbers not fast enough for the bulletin board downloads of the time. Those were the days!
Actually one of my friend's dad had a Tandy 2000 at home... for his business of course. JEALOUS!
Chris Bezant
@Reply 10 months ago
In 1981 I started with an Acorn Atom fully expanded from 1K to a heady 12K.
I also have a stash of old kit that I or a friend might need one day.
Chris Bezant
@Reply 10 months ago
By the way, I'm 78 today and still an Access junkie.
Michael Olgren
@Reply 10 months ago
In 1987 my parents gifted me a 12-pound Zenith laptop. No hard drive- you put one floppy with Windows into one drive and your software/storage floppy in the other.
Rick- search “computer recycle near me” to find where you can donate your stuff. There are usually a lot of places. Here on Cape Cod our town dump even takes that stuff and recycles it.
Michael I'd rather find some computer club or enthusiast that would like to put all the stuff together and use it rather than having it recycled for old parts and have the copper pulled out of it lol.
Btw, I still have my old Coco 2 in my storage unit. One of these days, I'm gonna put it together and see if it still works.
Sami Shamma
@Reply 10 months ago
Chris happy birthday.
Michael Olgren
@Reply 10 months ago
Richard I meant Comprenew for computer recycling. They recycle some but repair and distribute most. Just go to comprenew.org.
Bill Carver
@Reply 10 months ago
A quick story about a scsi cable internally on a hard drive from GCC installed in a Mac plus for the father of the owner of the Apple Dealership I worked for. I was moving the drive from one mac close to another and at the time the connection. were not keyed. and so I managed to get the cable offset by one set of pins. It was to say it was somewhat spectacular and as my friend Marty, who is now deceased, said I know the problem with the hard drive. It ran out of smoke.
The boss's father, who was looking right over my shoulder, asked me if that was supposed to happen. I said, well, it happened sometimes, and I quickly. reached behind me and took the digital board off of another hard drive. Put it on that one. And what was behold, it worked. That's when I became Catholic, at least in spirit. Thank you, Lord, for you has saved me from the wrath of the boss.
I did actually pay for the hard drive repair that was needed from quantum at the time. which was $200 for the price of the board.
Dave Clark
@Reply 10 months ago
Richard I had a Coco 3 but the tape drive as storage made me nuts. :)
Dave Definitely! I remember many times trying to CLOAD stuff multiple times before it finally told me nope.
I remember right towards the end... right before I actually got my first PC-compatible... I bought a >gasp< FLOPPY DRIVE for my Coco. It was a 5.25" beast, but it was miles ahead of the cassette.
Dave Clark
@Reply 10 months ago
Richard, You sure do take me back I was trying to remember the type of Hard Drives i had and I remember the expansion card installed in the Tandy Ex 1000 was a Winchester 8 bit card and the two hard drives I got were Winchester as well. I remember there were two types besides the SCSi RLL and MFM. RLL = Run-length limited and MFM = Modified frequency modulation
(I had to Look it up) mine were RLL I believe. Back when it was easier to get into your computer and modify and upgrade somewhat like cars. My two favorite computer phrases "Our Computers are User Friendly" and "Plug and Play" my thoughts on those don't differ much for my thoughts about politicians. I know no politics!
That brings me back to remembering when I used to run a bulletin board system. I think I had a 20 or 30 megabyte hard drive at the time. I was always running out of room for downloads, so I put it out there to the members of the BBS: "Hey, if you guys want to, let's take up a collection and I'll get a bigger drive." This is way before GoFundMe, by the way. People chipped in $5 here, $10 there. It was enough that I think we were able to buy a gigantic 1 GB hard drive. And I don't think I ever filled it. We're talking early 90s here. So I think it was like $1,000 too (in 1990s dollars - so double that today). It was incredible to look at how much technology has come in the past couple decades. Now I've got a 16 TB drive sitting on my desk that was like $300. LOL.
And as far as my "no politics" rules go, I don't care if we discuss politics. If you want to discuss policies or issues, that's fine. What I want to avoid is partisan mudslinging. I don't want people coming on here going, "Oh, Trump is the greatest ever" or "Obama did this and that." So as long as we avoid picking on specific parties, candidates, or politicians, then I'm okay with a little discussion about politics. That's fine.
I'm just doing my best to keep this a safe space and not alienate anybody, creating an "us" and "them" environment. That's all. Because believe me, I've got a lot of political views I'd like to share, but I try not to do that here.
But the one thing that I will always advocate for is science. So if anybody comes on here with any anti-science views, I will give them an earful, lol.
LLAP!
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