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Silicon Valley's Island of Misfit Tech

Posted by samzenpus on from the purpletooth-device dept.

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."

4 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Nice picture of a LaserJet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. atari 1040 by mikeabbott420 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  3. OP missed the golden age... by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ...

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    1. Re:OP missed the golden age... by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't know, every once in awhile I'll come across one and think "damn! They are still using THAT!" like the time I had a teacher ask me to pop in after class to see if I could fix this girl's PC. She was a single mom and going back to class and needed her PC to write up her papers on. So I walk in there and the girl looks like she is ready to cry, and the teacher says "don't worry, he can fix anything. I'm sure it'll be alright" and I look at this....thing. It was a 30Mhz running Windows 3. Not 3.11, windows fricking 3 on a whole 4Mb of RAM.

      So the girl looks at me all teary and goes "Can you fix it? I'm hoping to scrape enough from my job to get a used one in the fall and then maybe give this one to my boy. Can you fix it?" I told her not to worry, just wait a second. I went out to the back seat of my pickup and picked out a couple of nice SFF office boxes that had been donated to me by an SMB when they upgraded. I walked in there and said "Both of these are about 20 times faster than that poor old thing ever could be. they both have a clean install of Windows 2000 and Open Office. They're yours" and the poor thing tried to explain she couldn't afford them and when I finally got through to her they were freebies you thought she had won the lotto or something. I told her to back her car up by my truck and I would hand her the keyboards mice and monitors so she and her kid would both have working PCs and she just started crying. Never will understand women and the happy crying thing.

      So yeah, to geeks that is just old junk, but sometimes it can do some good. I'm sure most here wouldn't have even wanted those 733Mhz SFF office boxes, but I'm sure they are working good for that girl and her kid to this very day. Just as my first gamer rig, a 100MHz Pentium with a whopping 16Mb of RAM, is STILL working 5 days a week running an ISA card for an old custom lathe at a lumber company. The guy that bought it and my 233Mhz had been into every shop in town looking for a PC with ISA slots, and when I told him I had a couple you'd have thought he was gonna start dancing for joy. That is why we little mom & pop shops are pack rats, and you can find all kinds of little weird cards and such there. You just never know when you are gonna need that old hunk of junk, you know?

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