Old toys creak like old men
My house is littered with bin and piles of dead technology. Milk crates and U-Haul boxes full of cords, transformers, old floppies, manuals and creaky old rollerball mice are under every stair, on top of bookcases and hiding in closets.
I can't throw out a perfectly good SCSI-2 cable or a power cord for a long-dead cell phone or a serial cord. I wonder what this is all about?
Reason 1-They might come in handy some day.
Unlikely. No one will use a SCSI hard drive again until many centuries from now when people stage "Renaissance Fairs" aping the 20th Century, wandering around gnawing on turkey legs and talking on cell phones that look like loaves of bread sprouting licorice whips.
Reason 2-They might be worth something
Not a bloody chance. I have very rarely heard of old tech taking on collector's value. I'm sure that it will happen someday, but I'm not so sure that I'll still be alive then.
Reason 3-Tech people are packrats
Now we're getting to the meat of it. People who have done tech...programmers specifially and former programmers horde everything because they just do. For them, nothing is sweeter than filling up their house with junk for 25 years just for that one golden moment when a visitor looks up thoughtfully from their can of vintage Jolt Cola and ask: "say, this may be silly, but you wouldn't happen to have an external floppy drive for an Atari 800 lying around, would you?"
Posted on February 23, 2007
