Register readers mostly too ashamed to cop to hideous hoard horrors We're very, very disappointed that Reg readers did not answer our call for the hoardiest human to come forward and present photographic evidence of their obsession with hanging onto every last bit of crap. Despite many horror stories - including tales of small children buried under defunct computer kit landslides, and fire …
Times like this make me feel a twinge of sadness for the various heaps of often working techno-trash I've disposed of, because I am planning to move at some point.
Parallel port scanners, ancient motherboards, piles of computer magazines, and countless cards and cables that will never find a use again.
Unfortunately, if I were to try and offload all the IT related crap that's filling my cellar, they would probably refuse it on the basis that I must be trade - 7 CTR monitors, at least 20 rotting carcases of PCs from IBM PC-AT onwards, innumerable keyboards and mice, and the shells of two 2U HP servers, not to mention the hard drives, CD-ROM drives (2x speed, anyone?), modems, motherboards and graphic cards.
... a habit of building all my PCs in full tower floor-standing cases. They just don't fit the wheelie bins.
One has a 1x CD ROM drive that required the discs to be loaded into a caddy - had installed that one just before Computer Shopper started CD cover mounts. It doesn't even use a normal interface - ran directly from the sound card. That and the Logitech handheld scanner (own interface), the huge flatbed scanner that replaced it (own interface) and all the crazy gear that plugged into the 15-pin game port is just waiting for someone to sort out a USB-to-??? converter...
Not chucking any of it away though, because it might happen that I can use them again... in the face of cheaper, more reliable modern alternatives that are fully supported in Win7 - there's no challenge in just going shopping.
so:
a few Km of ehtenet cable, thats the 50 ohm coax stuff, and quite a few BNC connectors / T pieces.
A pile of ISA and such boards.
A stack of old memory, some in DIL packages....
Leads of all types. in a pile so big that I don't know what there is, so just get another one from the stores.
if I want a twisted pair ethernet I can only find USB. If I want usb, I can only find Firewire, and don't get me started on the pile oif 'usefull' D connectors in various forms and configuration, null modem, loop back, loop back with control, cross over, etc etc. all carefully labeled up, with sticky labels that are now falling off into the boxs.
then we old mother boards, PSU's of various vintages,
cases that only accept BTX boards,
but why would I want any of it
a raspery pi is more powerfull than any machine I could make out of this lot,
but I can' t chuck it, they might be useful, one day,
so on third house move they go again from one attic to the next, box's un oppened.
I think I need a coffee now, and may be a trip down the local computer flee market at lunch time to see what else there is I NEED.
> but I can' t chuck it, they might be useful, one day.
...and there you have it.
I am a (reasonably) rational person person but "I can't chuck it, it might be useful" means that my house is full of crap. Crap that really should be recycled so it might *actually* be useful.
What possible reason do I have for keeping that bag of Playstation 2 accessories? The PS2 itself is *long* gone. Do I really need that set of speakers from a long defunct stereo system? Or that box full of random sticks of EDO memory? What about those nasty plastic 5 1/4" blanking plates from a previous house-mate's tower?
Still, it could be worse, my father is now up to four sheds and a garage to store his "useful" crap....
"What possible reason do I have for keeping that bag of Playstation 2 accessories? The PS2 itself is *long* gone."
Funny thing is, I just got myself a second-hand PS2 for €10 earlier in the year, and have amassed a small collection of games - various GTA3s, some Sims, some racing car types, cute-chick-with-katana-and-lots-of-enemies. I'm not really a hardcore gamer so it sucks to find a game that doesn't have a pile of useful cheats (Lara Croft, I'm looking at you) because I like to explore, beat up the bad guys, and not worry too much about them fighting back. I have a Resident Evil (the one where she starts in a basement) and sans-cheat I made it about as far as the gloomy daylight before I got wasted. Pleasingly gory, but "YOU DIED" after three minutes sucks.
What also sucks is the stupid memory cards don't appear to be able to be reformatted in the PS2. A game came with a 16MiB card that would have been welcome, had it worked... Oh, and what's the point of a LAN socket if nothing seems able to use it?
In short - one person's junk may be another person's "oh, I needed that!".
The clever bit of (PC) software you might be interested in is XLink Kai. It allows you to play LAN enabled games (such as Gran Turismo for instance) over the internet. The software itself runs on a PC, connected to a router via ethernet, and with some wizardry redirects the PS2s LAN traffic (connected to the same router as the PC) via the internet! Very clever indeed.
It also works with XBox 360, XBox, Playstation 3, Playstation 2, Gamecube and PSP!
... only if it's fronted by Lester in a bad jumper and stick-on beard, Posh Paws replaced by Optimus Prime, and the wall of swaps staffed by Playmobil figures.
What about a swap meet? Or are there international conventions preventing a gathering of that many commentards in one place...?
and while I embark on an extermination mission every couple of (months), I usually give up after 10 - 20 deletes. And while I haven't counted all my files, they might easily be in excess of a couple of millions, combined. A billion perhaps? I'd be a bit surprised, but not staggered.
well, if you are deleting, clearly you don't. I've still got files I wrote for the Dragon 32 which I transferred to MSDOS 5.25 floppies to run under GW basic that need slight tweaking for the new screen size, and different joystick inputs....a rainy day job of low priority, but when I retire....
Me too ... backl in the days of 56k (or even 28k) modems when downloading a new version of netscape etc was a matter a many minutes then I used to have a "download" directory into which all downloads went and I never rarely deleted anything in it (only in extremis when disk got full and I hadn't got round to getting a bigger one!) so that if I'd uninstalled something that I decided I needed again then I could probably find the download file rather than having to re-download it .... and now some of those files dating back to the later 90s are almost certainly still sitting on my NAS!
Meanwhile, here at work had a quick look and have some files dating back to 1989!
Pile it all in the canoe, just in case of flood.
I see where you're coming from but I'm not sure that would work for me. The two largest items in my main garage are two 20' ISO shipping containers so I'd need one hell of a canoe. The other garage isn't quite so excessive.
(the thought of MY psychiatric wife has just stopped me in my tracks of thinking of anything more on this subject)
You'll get over her. I did. ;-)
I was sad that one and half pairs of high quality knockers disappeared that day, but I like to think of it as an acrimonious separation, after all, she left the hinges.
It accumulates quite effortlessly.
Anyone need a drawer-full of mice, trackballs and other pointing devices? Almost all nearly working?
What I don't understand is where all the power strips go. I've bought enough to circle the globe, but can never find one when I need it.
... I'll out myself, and submit an article to ElReg about my 28x60 foot machineroom/museum/mausoleum/morgue. Old kit that still works, and does exactly what it was designed to do, is still actually useful! For a couple examples, see:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/370244
--and---
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/373033
Those boxen are still doing their jobs, four years later. And they were ancient then. Constantly upgrading is throwing money away, no matter how you look at it ...
I do remember selling a computer once.
An Amstrad 6128.
Other than that I still have all the computers I have bought or built starting from a Sinclair Spectrum from 1984.
As I live on my own there is no-one to nag me about clearing them out and as I haven't moved house in over 30 years that spur to disposal is missing as well.
I do actually use some of the older stuff from time to time. Getting some software to run is a lot easier when everything is of the same vintage i.e. getting stuff from the 1990s going is easier on an AMD K6 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 card and so on.
So keep hold of that stash, it MAY well come in handy one day.
but everything I have is essential. I could not bear to part with my 8 inch floppy disks with CP/M and MS Fortran, my RCA vacuum tube manual, my original copy of "The C Programming Language" by K&R (the one without function prototypes), my complete collection of first year university lecture notes or the wall I made out of BYTE magazines.
I have a shed just like that garage, occasionally I need something and think "I've got one of those in the shed".
I open the door, take one look and wish I could find (or even get to if it is visible at the back) what it is I'm looking for.
Then I close the door and find something else to do.
I must get another shed and this one I promise I will keep tidy :)
Is what to do with them when they're full.
I have a single garage (and 2 garden sheds) filled with several Volkswagens, in component form, in cardboard boxes - tenuous IT angle, but there is a custom ECU in there somewhere that I built. After several wet summers and less than effective damp-proofing, the boxes are reverting to pulp, and their contents slowly re-arranging themselves.
To combat this I 'acquired' about 60metres of freestanding shelving which, in it's disassembled form filled the remaining free space in the garage. I now have no space to assemble the shelves.
You're not too bad yet. My stepfather has 2 MG's in various states of disrepair in his garage, and... An airplane. Not to mention a trailer in the backyard (used to haul the airplane) that is packed full of things that HE CAN'T PART WITH, and the kicker: he built a basement to hold all of his model train (and other) stuff.
Bought the house next door, demolished it, and built an extension with a basement that could house a bowling alley. And the basement is nearly full. That's my yardstick for hoarding. Oh, and there's a museum of ramshackle computer equipment around the compound.
So if you need a dot matrix printer... He has 2. And reams of paper.
Petr0lhead
The problem with garages..
Is what to do with them when they're full.
Oh bro, your not thinking big enough. It's simple, Forget the Garage, go to the lumber yard, buy 2 * 6's and 4 * 12 Flooring sheets J79's? I forget the term, I know it when I see it, a compressed product used for roofing. Then don't forget the metal joist holders, tape measure, hammer, nails, skilsaw, maybe some big SPIKE NAILS 12 " and some bolts (for structure) Now get up in the rafters, measure 16" - 24" on center, and get busy, inspect first-don't nail a 12" nail through a wiring bundle!! Oh yeah you need a ladder Sorry add it to the list. Maybe add beer and pizza to the list too for rounding the whole thing out. It will COST LESS than storage.
Alternatively, if you have someone who's a military dorm clean freak, add some carpet and a few electrical outlets (mains) , a flatscreen, a futon style mattress (forget frames, box springs, and headboards), and they can live up there.
Or they can live up there and you slowly add more dusty plastic stuff until they logically must leave.
If you can't do the house, expand the ROOF or Rafters of the garage. If you got big money, cut the roof off and build a second floor. Look up and find where the space is. Always stack things straight and level and to the roof, they use less space that way. I know a guy ran a CB shop out of a bedroom, from floor to ceiling wall after wall of CB radios, one table in the middle of the room.
I would quite like to stuff my garage full of "might be useful one day" bits & pieces. Unfortunately my garage is already full of my mate's kit car.
He has a lovely double garage of his own, stuffed with 2 more kit cars & large numbers of assorted parts. He also has 2 more in his garden, plus one on his driveway - the only one that actually runs, so I am storing the overflow. My garage is quire large, which is good because another mate moved away & I have a load of HER stuff filling in the gaps round the car; anyone want an old 32 inch CRT TV?
At my last house I had 2 of the things in my single garage; as those were 2 seater sporty things so low slung, he rigged up a giant stand so they were sort of double decked.
I had a garage as bad as that, and it was a constant background worry knowing that l'd have to deal with it some day (or my loved ones if I'd perished first). It took several weekends of trips to the local tip before I finally ended up with a single row of boxes at the back of a now useful space. Mainly Christmas decos and some childhood stuff to hang onto for the pleasure of nostalgia, and stuff that really is useful once in a while but not often enough to be worth bringing into the house.
I finally realised that the stuff that 'might be useful one day' hadn't been used for years, and is the kind of stuff that can be bought for peanuts in a poundland. And the stuff that 'might be worth something one day' really won't be. Take a look on eBay for what it's really worth.
It's worth far more to have the space and tidyness, and knowing that if you ever need to move house, it won't be anywhere near as stressful as it would have been. And I'd hate to leave that mess behind for my beloveds to deal with, if I get run over by a bus, virus, mutation, or vein blockage.
Take some pics of the junk you can't bear to part with, because most of the pleasure you get from it is just seeing it and having it remind you of bygone days. These days a 'photo' costs nothing but a MegaByte or two of diskspace, so it's almost free. You don't really need the physical item in your hand half the time. You can still tell the grandchildren "this is what gramps used to use when I was your age" by showing them the photo - as if they'd really care :)
so didn't bother to submit my collection of 1990-onward PC junk. It would make a good pile, if it wasn't scattered all over the house. I think perhaps this weekend's mission should be to sort out just what there is that might still get used, which probably shouldn't include things like ISDN modems and SparQ drives. eBay? Or maybe I should just build a shed.
I'm sure we've all got piles of shit that in the right circumstances could be useful to someone else for the price of collection or postage.
I've got a pile of AGP graphics cards, a couple of PCI-E, a box full of old memory 128K to 1G, several sound cards plus a load of other stuff.
In my minds-eye there's a school somewhere that could upgrade their old computers, more memory, better graphics, sound. Then there's all those leads, ethernet cables...
Of course it might just be better to grow up and throw it away.
...you find yourself in a position with a two year old Dell Precision tower, running Windows 7 64bit, and the on-board video gets zapped due to an electrical storm from hell that blew up the solar panels on the roof, killed a router, UPS, and printer. Just buy another PCI-e video card and move on right? Oh Noooes! Dell neglected to solder in the PCI-e slot, you can see where it *should* have been, but Dell saved 10 cents. Two PCI slots only.
Do you realize how difficult it is to find a PCI video card that works with Win7Pro? I finally found an old Trident in a box I haven't looked in ages at.
Moral of the story is that sometimes it's not a bad thing to keep your parts around.
;)
if thats not a sign from above about buying a Dell then i don't know what is....
Just junked a load of old pc's and associated kit felt weird but then reliased that even the oldest of my (3-5 year old) laptops would out power it so why keep them "just in case". same with old CRT tv's if our (only) tv went i could easily survive on the other digital kit so why am i hanging on to those two hulking monsters
My stash includes two Electrons I've never used (got a Beeb), an 8" drive that nothing interfaces to, an Apple-branded Miniscribe 20MiB SCSI harddisc that is the slowest thing ever built. Somewhere I have a Umatic tape that I have no idea what to play it on or what's on it (maybe a lost episode of Dr Who?). BBC micro printer cables? Got plenty. There's a big box full of "obsolete stuff" in the corner of the room, with other things scattered around - like a Beeb with half its ICs missing. I can't get rid of the board because the day I do will be the day the 74LS1234 blows up in the main Beeb and this part just won't exist any longer. Or some obscure PAL or ULA will need to be unsoldered and transferred across, so it is useful (even though I've not powered up the actual Beeb in years because it's so much simpler to run an emulator...).
All of this, and can I find a USB lead with the right sort of connection when I need to? Can I heck... <sigh>
For me the tipping point was reached when I started looking at my stuff and thinking "Even if I'm never going to use that keyboard/power supply/battery pack/STB/monitor ever again, I might be able to disassemble it and use the bits". Equally, "It's broken beyond repair, but I could probably fish a working capacitor out of it. And that backplane support bracket looks useful".
That's when I knew it'd gone too far.
In the last two house moves I've taken van loads of collected crap to the tip. Including random power supplies that I had no idea what they powered, an ISDN router - I've never had an ISDN line, at least 6 dead or semi-dead PCs, and ancient graphics and other cards.
I'm down to one crate of random junk now, but I do have a box full of old mobile phones. I keep telling myself they are classics and will be worth money one day...
I have only needed one thing (can't remember what it was now) that I kept "just in case" for years and binned, and I could now do with the KVM switch I threw out. I am finally using the media centre remote control I bought on a whim about 5 years go though.
Actually things aren't too bad. I'm considering chucking the 5.25 inch drives and stopped buying anything that's old, slow, noisy and power hungry. I was tempted by some Sun Blade systems, but unless you buy a PGX card their graphics card isn't supported by anything useful including later versions of Solaris! The old sparcstation is up in the loft and the O2 boxes might join them if I can't find a way to quiten them down..
emulation is also great, and stops me buying original kit when the performance is good enough
... at least that's what I keep telling myself.
I occasionally have to have a clear out and get rid of the old kit that hasn't been used in years. Either that or the wife get's all upperty.
Trouble is I have been given an Amstrad PC 1512 with a shed loads of 5.25" Public Domain discs. I decided to archive the lot of them to zip files to preserve the software. I can't interface the Amstrad to the network (it would probably be more trouble doing than it's worth) and I can't find my stash of 1.2mb 5.25" floppy drives. I kept a computer to hook them upto that could connect to the network but after turning the house, loft and garage upside down I can only guess that they went in one of the periodic clearouts. Damn!
It's getting harder and harder to preserve old data these days as storage systems become defunct. This is what I keep explaining to the missus.
So if anybody out there has any old 1.2mb 5.25" floppy drives that they can bare to part with then let me know...
if you can find one that old, you may be able to connect an old 3.5" Fdd, (the 720K ones, NOT the 1.44Mb ones as the interface changed slightly)
Alternatively, you may want to try a null modem cable to another PC (Although serial ports are starting to become an extinct species) (I remember laplink years ago, do they still make that?)
I seem to remember i managed to get Minix on to a 1640 not too many years ago, Cant remember how i did it though. I suspect i may have put the hard drive card into a 486 that was obsolete enough to still have 16 bit slots and with a bios still able to understand 8 bit hard drive controllers.
Now there's a thought. I still have a laplink cable and the softwarre should be easy to find if I dont have it. I could rig up an old laptop that I have and copy the data over that way. It would just be a bit slower than I would like and thereare about 300-400 discs to go thorugh.
I'll still keep my eyes open for an old 1.2mb floppy drive. May take a trip down the tip and talk to the guys who run it to see if I can have any drive I find in the electronics/electrical bins.
I do have one here - Chinon FZ-506 Rev A.. Will have to see if it still works. Realistically I'll never use it again - I have lots of 3.5" disks but practically no 5.25". I also have one of these lovely pieces of kit : http://www.lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=42 - never have a floppy fail again..
I suppose I should think of junking the 486DX2-66 with 20MB RAM too. It made a decent uTorrent box with NT4 and large IDE drivers, but the check time when transfers went wrong were excruciatingly long..
In San Francisco they are just signed off to start building 20' * 20' (5 meters) "sustainable" (puke/vomit) homes, I see the problem is you don't build big enough homes to hold your property. If all you want is an empty home with flower vase and shaving bowl on the dresser, and a netbook stuffed behind the toilet.
There's nothing wrong with hording this stuff. I have boxes and boxes of MFM, and other vertical rack server sheet after sheet of golden memory chips. I'm not recycling, I'm SELLING them. Especially with the monetary systems so corrupt, you may be LIVING on that stuff, or bartering, soon enough. And look the first picture has a canoe, I have a RAFT! I live in a flood zone, coincidence? There's nothing abnormal here for an inventor, hacker, electronics tech. Sure those keyboards are big but hey you might need an i8048 one day! whip out the propane torch tap tap on the floor and boom instant steaming hot electronics parts delivery.
(note to the young: If your doing more than one board, be sure to ventilate the lead solder and green circuit board to black charred remains smoke, I don't care about safety glasses and hot solder, you need to get some in your eye at least once)
"Kind and resourceful people see potential value in every cracked and crazy thing.
"Throwing it out may be a waste, but if you can't find and use things in the mess, they are already lost to you.
"On top of that is buildings and space you cannot use, clarity and beauty lost, wasted.
"Its already wasted. You are only gaining by letting it go.
[Cecilia Macaulay, "How to create beauty - lessons from a Japanese Farmhouse makeover"]
...when you try to use magic to make the cables tidy themselves up. You are the apprentice, the sorcerer is the Unix guru in the basement office (no windows of any sort, obviously).
Mind you, whilst the cables magically replicate, SCSI termination blocks disappear into dust without any help whatsoever.
Specifically, keeping them "just in case" the panels can one day be used for something, the lack of a working inverter/controller board being a major headache and most of the time they have serious damage/bad lines/etc.
Make a video wall with them and Raspberry Pi Model A's maybe?
Same with old power supply boards, most of the time the optos can be reused but the capacitors are usually worthless and wound components aren't worth much these days unless you are making voltage converters.
The only exception was the >50 ferrite toroids rescued from a box of wiring which along with the 34063 based phone charger carcass pile are being repurposed into power supplies for bicycle lights.
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess and a handsome prince. The prince asked the princess for her hand in marriage, and she said no. So instead of wasting his time on a quest to change her mind, he spent the rest of his life riding motorcycles; dating girls half his age; drinking as much whisky as he liked; [accumulating all the technological junk that he liked]; and generally having a great time --- and he lived happily ever after.
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I have a garage full of clutter, and half of it is old computer equipment which is clearly out of date, needs to be thrown away, and ... it's ILLEGAL to throw it away! It can only be disposed of at certain licensed locations, with pre-registration, a few times a year. Next date coming up is in June. Probably it'll be on a weekend like this past year, when I'm busy with another project and can't make it.
So actually, here in the United States, this is a problem created by regulation.
Total bugbear of mine - keeping endless piles of crap. Ending up with 99percent of it totally useless, but robbing you of so much space. Is it really worth not having a backbedroom and having a living room that looks like the set of "steptoe and son" so that just ONCE in 20 years you might have that piece of kit you really need in a box somewhere... that you just can't find... so you go out and buy a new one. Then find the old one a week later... When you REALLY don't need it since you now have a newer one, but now you know where it is you keep it as a "spare".... Usually you waste so much time looking for the one you know you've got somewhere (and pray still works!) it would have been quicker just to go out and buy a new one that you KNOW still works!
All that said. Yup. I do it, too.
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