BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH bofh_pic You know, sometimes I wish someone just had the balls to say they want a new iPad cos it looks cool. That they have no clue of what the f$*# they’d use it for, but their kids think they’re great and they can’t be stuffed forking out the money themselves for one so they figure the company should just get one and …
The one time I had one "assigned" by my employer, was because we got a handful of Jornadas from one of those boxes.
But hey, that one had useful stuff like:
- a SCSI PCI card
- internal SCSI cable
- DDS4 DAT drive
- a Palm Tungsten
some other stuff, but those are the ones that we actually used.
I still keep a reel-to-reel tape kicking around to scare the youngsters with. I used to laugh at the old fart who kept a reel of punch-tape for similar purposes. I am horribly aware of what I have become. And why was there no Centronics lead in the box? Surely everyone has one of those somewhere?
All the assorted junk that used to perch on top of the old crt monitors, oh the tears throughout the office when the IT dept upgraded everybody to flat screen and made the sylvanian families homeless. The following morning I was screaming as over two hundred assorted furry critters, gonks and small teddy bears re-appeared in my office with a post-it note asking for asylum. I've still got them lurking in several boxes.
Oh I see I fucked up on the de(st/s)(c/r)(u/i)ption 8.5" floppy
"the program in that photo is called "pagination" is what runs off that particular disc I tooked the photo off of. She runs on the 2x @ dual 8.5" floppy drives (what does that take up 3'?) + the CPU box, iut's a laundrymat of power sucking hell for floppy disk0rz. Wee ha ha.
so I see a lot of your old junk. We've had half a dozen Mac Classics with failed safety test stickers, an Epson HX-20, couple of CUB monitors for the BBC Micro, a sealed set of Windows 3.11, a boxed set of MS Office 4.2 (somebody actually bought that on eBay), Token Ring cards, a fossil record through the ages of tape backup drives, a PPC640, a Compaq Portable III, a fecking great LED sign panel and of course lots more.
Well I just finished taking apart a HP laptop with nonfunctional screen, two ACERs about to fall apart and a DELL Inspiron from before the war with fully dead batteries.
I now have a large bag of metal/pastic/mainboard/cabling/screws trash as well as an assortment of loose CPUs, TFT screens, harddisks [the 20GB IBM Travelstar from the DELL rattles, so I think the heads aren't properly parked], RAM SODIMMs, two WiFi modules and an ATI Rage module of 2001. As well as a Li-Ion battery packs.
The recycling center beckons.
Can I do anything useful with the WinXP/Win2K keys?
Before Zip, there was SyQuest: 5-3/16ths inch cartridges (the actual disks are ~5.25") that weigh almost a pound each and contained a whopping 44MB of data (they got up to 200MB last I knew, before Zip walked 'em off the portable storage market plank and into the briny deep).
Also, how about a "mouse" that has the ball under the thumb instead of underneath (Kensingtom, I think)? No potential tendonitis issues there, no sirree.
"Superfloppies" that could somehow store much more data than the average floppy but required a superfloppy drive else they'd be written upon like a "regular" floppy and any superness removed therefrom.
Various scanners, from then-top-of-the line Sony beasties with a big fat SCSI connexion to the cheap-jack free-with-a-purchase USB connected ones.
I don't suppose there's any way to quickly strip old power/ connector cables of their casings and harvest the copper within, is there. Damn.
Punch cards: my dad always had a stack of 'em on his desk and I always liked making more holes in 'em. Oops.
I don't suppose there's any way to quickly strip old power/ connector cables of their casings and harvest the copper within, is there. Damn.
----
A friend was offered a machine only last week for doing just that!
Apparently it worked on the principal of chopping the cable into very short lengths (approx 0.5mm long) then vibrating (I think) to separate the PVC from the copper, depositing each in a container, copper for weighing in, PVC for making into traffic cones IIRC.
He was offered it for a couple of grand.
@skeptical i... "I don't suppose there's any way to quickly strip old power/ connector cables of their casings and harvest the copper within, is there."
Electricians used to save their scrap cable then have a bonfire before taking it to the scrapie... Obviously frowned upon these days due to the billowing clouds of noxious smoke it creates... most scrapie's I've dealt with recently, will take insulated copper so don't worry about it.
I see your box of random ancient IT gear, and raise you a matched pair of 512Mb EDO RAM in original packaging, _with_ the original installation instructions no less.
They were salvaged along with an ancient file server with 8 x 25Gb SCSI disks that had regrettably not survived their mothballing experience.
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