Slashdot Mirror
Silicon Valley's Island of Misfit Tech
harrymcc writes "For more than 20 years, Sunnyvale's cavernous, aptly-named Weird Stuff Warehouse has sold an amazing array of salvage and surplus computer products. It's like a tech museum where everything's for sale at bargain-basement prices — from shrinkwrapped Atari 1040ST software to used BetaMAX tapes to 1GB hard drives to mysterious printed circuit boards to Selectric typewriters. I paid a visit to this legendary geek temple and snapped photos of some of the fascinating stuff I came across."
Porn?
Porn - back in the day before cow udder sized fake tits and shaved vaginas - back when the women looked like women and not like tweens with two malignant tumors on their chests.
My desk is an island of misfit tech :)
Some things are still work perfectly: I'm not trading my four (!) LaserJets 4M+ (and 4+ modded to 4M+ and mem-maxed) for any of today's cheapo crap (ok, ok, in the article it's a LaserJet IIP but still).
These were semi-professional printers and they're outlasting any non-professional printer that you can buy today. There's a reason why a good, low page count, 4M+ still goes on for $100 on eBay. These are indestructible devices of an age where quality in the U.S. was the norm.
Still use on of them daily and I regularly "round robbin" them :)
My desk at home is : LaserJet 4M+ and IBM Model M hooked to a Core 2 Duo + 24" Samsung screen. Pretty cool to have a 16 years old printer and a 21 years old keyboard (times four, just in case) that still work perfectly and that are still used on a daily basis.
Quality I tell ya.
90% of it is at least partially compatible with modern hardware. I was expecting something legitimately odd.
They should rename this place to Boring Stuff Bonanza.
I can, to some degree, understand people being a little nostalgic for the old days of computer tech. I'm not all that nostalgic about it myself, but if I ever did decide to get nostalgic about it, those are not the items I would pick. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95??? Good riddance to those crappy operating systems! A broken down P-133 with 16MB RAM??? A Betamax tape? WTF?
If you're going to be nostalgic about old computing stuff, at least pick stuff that was actually cool at the time. Like maybe a Commodore 64 or even an Apple IIe. Or maybe an old copy of Zork. Heck, even things like the Mac Plus, or Turbo Pascal would be more interesting than a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 3.1.
Yes, I'm sure they've got all those things and more at Weird Stuff Warehouse, but TFA sure picked the wrong items to be nostalgic about.
I learned 68000 assembler on a Atari 1040 later I remember having a C programming environment in a 400K ramdisk (sozobon?).
It ended up being used as a serial terminal on 386/486 unix systems when I started programming professionally.
This article may be the first time I've thought of it in a decade.
Ah, to be young and enthusiastic again.
Nostalgia by Veidt.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Ah cool! I was wondering what the hell that was.
When WeirdStuff had satellite solar panels (when they were still at Syncamore Drive in Milpitas) ... or 4 platter 8 inch 20MB Hard Disk with spindle motor running off AC ...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
If you are already on vacation in Orlando, convince your family to go to Skycraft Parts & Surplus.
http://skycraftsurplus.com/
They are off of I-4 and Fairbanks near downtown, you can't miss the giant UFO on the roof.
They get a lot of old NASA/Lockheed gear, plus everything from de-soldered 74-series DIPs to Oscilloscopes to Electric Motors.
I used to love going into Weirdstuff in the mid-late 90's. I had just moved to Silicon Valley and was in awe of the incredible stuff they had. This was back when they had a location further down in Sunnyvale, right across the street from the old Sunnyvale Fry's location. At the time I worked for NCA down the block. They were a small competitor to Fry's. I think it was on Lawrence Expressway.
Anyway, I remember going in there and they had an old phone company switch board from back in the days when the operators physically connected the two phone lines by hand. It was awesome!
I'm in the DFW area now, and the closest thing I've found is Electronic Discount Sales in Arlington, TX. It's fairly cool but not nearly as awesome as Weirdstuff. And they over-price too much of their used parts.
Nothing to see here
They could obviously sell all this stuff on ebay (or the like) with thousands of potential buyers who would never swing by this warehouse and pick something up. And probably at higher prices, at least on average. How come they aren't? Does anyone know if there's someone behind this store funding it? Or are they actually making good money with this store?
it's a little better than that -the backroom (3/4 of a huge warehouse) has dozens of telco racks, lots of old token ring and even stranger networking gear as well as lots of cabling equipment.
In the front area you can buy old sgis and sparcstations for a pittance and they also have a cool looking touchpad linux barebones (no case) for ~$200 iirc
definitely geek heaven for sili valley -others mentioned Halted or Haltec, but that is more of a parts emporium although they do have some weird stuff too.
-I'm just sayin'
We also used to use round circuit boards (stacked) inside a jack-in cylindrical PLC used in all sorts of industrial panels. The devices had to pass very specific standards on encapsulation since they were used in environments where a single small spark could blow up a substantial chunk of real estate.
It's easier and safer to seal a circular opening.