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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."
Round circuit board is a needle Probe card. (For testing IC's) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_card
Oh great, slides of the family vacation. Fine. I'm going to the kitchen.. I'll be back glassy eyed and with a bowl of popcorn in a few!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
RePC. There's one in Seattle south of the stadiums, plus it has a computer history museum inside of it with lots of seriously old machines on display. There is another RePC (sans museum) in Tukwila, south of Seattle.
Never seen traffic walk signs there before, but I've seen basically everything else shown here on sale at RePC, though the prices seem better than at RePC.
I picked up a C64C with some floppy drives, some monitors to go with old 8-bit machines, an Apple //GS, and some other stuff. Those machines are seriously cheap nowadays.
90% of it is at least partially compatible with modern hardware. I was expecting something legitimately odd.
Between the racks I got from Weird Stuff, the tube radio I got at Electronics Flea Market, the wiring and connectors, and components I get from Halted and Al Lasher's Electronics, (I still miss Quinn's Electronics, though...), I almost don't need to go to Fry's or order from Digi-Key.
Not that I don't go to Fry's, Digi-Key, or even eBay, but it's nice to still be able to get parts 'n' stuff on a Saturday for $5 in gas and a pleasant drive, rather than a $5 shipping charge and a three-day wait. (I don't mind paying $5 for a $1 connector, but if I gotta go that route, I'll be damned if I'm gonna wait for it :)
Alas, the surplus store memorial list gets longer with every passing year.
But that covers a few places I know of in the Bay Area. Where are your surplus stores?
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.
what we have become
just look what we have done
all that we destroyed
you must build again
Those were the days... <sigh> ;-)
Your mission, if you dare to accept it, is to solder a C64 back to life tonight.
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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because he gets ad revenue from each page's banners, 22 in all.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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!?
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
Luke: "Are you all right? What's wrong?"
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror..."
For more bad memories, (for older readers like me), there's a photo of a boxed set Win95 'upgrade'.
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?
He didn't get much from me. I closed the damn thing at the third pic/page. Starting with old wrapped boxes, expecting to bait users to see more? Hmf, booooring. Stupid start, stupid article, and stupid scheme.
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'
I get hundreds of emails a day offering to upgrade my Wang
http://technologizer.com/2010/02/10/silicon-valleys-island-of-misfit-tech/13/