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While preparing to move, I had to clean up my storage room in the basement. I’ve lived in the same place for exactly 9 years (if we don’t count the last month where I couldn’t live in the apartment after the fire), so I’ve managed to accumulate quite a lot of crap. This is a series of pictures of some of the weirdest crap I found. Not that the around 20 computers and 10 3D monitors (that’s what I call CRT displays – I should totally be in sales) I discarded are not featured.
5.25" diskette drive cleaner
FORM costume accessories from one of the first TK parties I attended where all of HEST was dressed up as FORM.
OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 Warp as well as a game pack for OS/2. I think 3.0 included over 50 3.5" diskettes.
Old books describing what to do when starting high school and college, i.e., these are from 1996 and 1999 and completely useless.
AUI-TP converter or MAU (media access unit) aka. transducer. A doohickey for converting the old thick ethernet to the modern twisted pair ethernet. I've actually used this in the past, as I could only get a thicknet ethernet adaptor for my IBM PS/2 server (it was using MCA to connect extension boards rather than ISA/VESA/PCI or what have you).
Very old computer and very very old computer. A ICL comet (running CP/M) and an IBM PS/2 server. Both are built like tanks and are totally obsolete. The comet has dual 5.25" DSDD diskette drives and the IBM has a 3.25" 2.88 MB diskette drive AS WELL AS a 200 MB hard disk.
A bunch of keyboards as well as some 386 and 486 mainboards, a bunch of floppy drives and a few hard disks.
A bag full of old 30 pin SIMMs. Each of these bad boys provide your computer with 1 MB of RAM and they have to be installed in quadruples. I even think I see a couple of 4 MB modules in there. Those were rare.
A bunch of old 72 pin SIMMs, each containing 4 MB RAM. These could be installed alone, but many computers preferred they were installed in pairs. I must have lost some along the way, because I definitely remember having 3-5 times as many of these.
Old network adaptor. I think this one is 10 Mbit/s Ethernet from Ericsson (yes, they once made computers). It supports BOTH thicknet and thinnet.
I also decided to clean up my office – I basically had to – and found this gem there as well:
5.25" DSDD (double side, double density for a whopping 354 KiB – typically advertised as 360 kb – of storage) diskette drive. I "modded" to instead work as a work-o-meter. Simply spin the round thingamajig and if the green arrow points into the black "Work" area at the top, you have to work. Otherwise it's ok to procrastinate.
Are those old type of diskette cleaners still for sale anywhere? I’ve recently been forced to use an old computer because of some old information stored on diskettes. However the the diskette reading doesnt function all properly. So basicaly im having a problem.
I have no idea… A tip may be getting an LS-120 drive if the data is important. They use much more advanced technology and can often read (3.5″) diskettes that are unreadable by real diskette drives. The information does deteriorate on diskettes, so after 10-15 years the chance of recovering data gets slim (unless you use dedicated data recovery serves, but they are very expensive; I think one is called IBAS).