True Tales of Tech Hoarding

Recently some member of my household forced me to watch several episodes of A&E's Hoarders. This led to several *ahem* discussions about hoarding tendencies and the closet of cables, wires, boxes and parts in my basement. But I'm not doing bad compared to some of these tech hoarders. My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.

Comments

I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this week.

[Maxo-Texas]

Took out the hard drives... maybe... maybe... I'll mount them and extract them.

Took out the memory (???? who is going to use the old memory- why did I do that?)

Threw two away- put the other on the curb (it felt like a super high quality case someone might want).

Entire box of random cables (sorted through it and kept 5 "special" cables but tossed the rest.

When in doubt, watch an episode of Hoarders.

Trying to get my house in decent shape for a party this weekend.

At least the new tech is small

[qwerty8ytrewq]

Not that many years ago my dad got an air-spun harddrive the size of a washing machine, and an electron microscope the size of a kitchenette stashed in our back shed. To be fair, he did remake it into some cool shit, but really, it was all about love of last years tech. I still think about diving into any dumpster I go past that I see wires poking out of. Recycling is such a good crutch for the hoarder.

Re:At least the new tech is small

[markass530]

I was intrigued by your mention of that "Air Spun Hard Drive" but didn't come up with anything on wikipedia, did it go by other names?

Re:You call that hoarding?

[DJRumpy]

My 'tech closet' is very similar, although not so neatly organized. I have a big box of random video/audio cables, and another box of PC parts, ranging from expansion cards for things like SATA when SATA wasn't integrated, and video capture cards. The rest consists of old optical drives, old IDE/SATA drives, Motherboards, old video cards, etc. Every few years I go through and throw out items that I'm not likely to need anymore (simm's, ISA cards, 10MB NIC's, etc). Although I can see things getting very messy, I do have a sig other to keep things in perspective. I would only hope that others who keep a similar stash have someone else to keep them in line from time to time.

I do occasionally have to defend the value of my tech closet. I have saved friends and family some significant cash over the years just by recycling parts from there. I probably re-use maybe 30-40 percent and the rest gets tossed, but better some reuse/value than none at all.

Partial Reinforcement

[BlueBoxSW.com]

Any psych-turned-CS person will tell you that the hardest behaviors to break are partial reinforcement.

Behaviors that don't pay off all the time, but sometimes do.

Anyone who has saved hours of time by pulling out an obscure manual from the bottom of a pile, or recovered data with the help of a rare connector type from the junk closet, is getting partially reinforced.

And therefore, will continue to collect.

Re:Partial Reinforcement

[greed]

Right; if I give something away, I know I'm going to need it in the next 6 to 12 months.

I gave away my last AGP video card a couple of years back. 4 weeks later, my fileserver went down with bad capacitors on its AGP video card.

I gave away my solderless breadboards. I've since had to replace them....

Power supplies... RAM DIMMs... you name it.

(Part of this is because I'm the fix-it guy for a small start-up and all my friends, especially the ones with "restricted finances" let's say.)

Anything that's truly not needed, I can't give away: QIC 150 SCSI tape drive, for example, or 3X CD-ROM caddy-loading drives.

So I'll stick with organizing things instead of trying to get rid of them. If I do get a new technology X, it's best to try and sell the old one right away. Don't wait a year or two until it's beyond obsolete, but not a classic.

Re:I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this we

[golem100]

Given that my significant other is moving in with me, some "adjustments" have been made to my single-Engineer lifestyle.. This past week I delivered unto the philistine clutches of the local Electronics Recycler: Six Amiga 1200 Computers; [14 MHz MC68EC020/2MB/120MB EIDE HDD] Four Amiga 3000 Computers; [16 and 25 MHz MC68030/18MB/105 to 400 MB SCSI HDD's] Two Amiga 4000 Computers; [25 MHz MC68040/18MB/250MB SCSI HDD's] Five Amiga 4000T PCBA's; Two VideoToasters; 1 Moniterm Monitor; 40 SCSI HDD's; [of various generations--including an originally USD$4000 Maxtor "Magic" 1.2GB] 10 UHD-FDD's; [1.76MB 3.5"] Two DC250 SCSI Tape Drives; [and about 100 Tapes--incl. the contents of every Amiga Pirate BBS in USA circa 1992] One Irwin FDD-interface tape drive; [another dozen or so tapes] One Microtek 4800dpi SCSI Flat-bed Scanner; About a dozen PC Motherboards--VLB, PCI, and expansion boards--a bunch of Adaptec SCI host adapters going back to ISA; Three Northgate Omni-Ultra Keyboards; A box of "Cherry" ERGO Keyboards; a couple of EGA Monitors; and about 20 tubes of 4Mbit Flash Memory that I paid USD$70/pc for!!! The Commodore SX64 stays! What's left? Mostly Engineering documentation--Schematics, BOM's, Service Manuals--and plus a couple of functioning CDTV's, an A1000 and a A2500HD... [and the video game collection from hell...I've got any GameStop seriously beat!] Sigh.

Re:I used to do this

[mcgrew]

When my marriage broke up and I lost the house, I had a half dozen computers and a whole bunch of other stuff. I moved into a tiny apartment with my then-teenaged daughter, and left most of it at the old house the bank was taking. First, there just wasn't room (I had to rent a storage shed for the stuff I did keep), and second, moving all my junk just became too painful. I still have all (well, most) of my cables, though, and the woman who's staying with me now bitches because I'm a hoarder.

Re:You call that hoarding?

[Shotgun]

I used to have many, many more boxes of parts and wires I never used, but now I have a wife, and she is the opposite of a hoarder: she's a compulsive thrower-outer. If you can't justify its existence, it's gone.

My wife used to try that. Then she ended up needing a few cables or such. I told her to go to BestBuy to price them. Then I'd go to my closet and pull out a few, or make one up from others. She learned real quick that my stash is not just a random collection of wires.

Re:You call that hoarding?

[spun]

We have an open marriage. I'm useful to her not because I satisfy her sexually, though I do at least as well in that regard as anyone who has been married for ten years, but rather, because we have each other's back, because we have the same moral center, and because our strengths complement each other's weaknesses.

Re:My Dad's house looked like Mike Quinn's

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former patron of Quinn's (damn, I miss being able to just buy components without having to wait for Digi-Key or having to drive all the way to the South Bay), and while I'm sure nobody'll miss the AT-style PCs and stuff, there's probably some stuff in what's left that's actually worth something to someone.

. I suspect there is more stuff packed into closets, garage, and rafters. I know there is vintage 50s and 60s electronics and test equipment out there somewhere, though I haven't seen it since I was a kid. And I think there's also stacks of obsolete laptop computers and luggables, which were probably already obsolete when he started buying them as surplus and now are doubly obsolete.

Where you wanna go is the Electronics Flea Market in Cupertino.

...as a seller, not a buyer. Talk to whoever walks up, even if you end up giving most of the stuff away, you'll also get an idea as to what, if anything, is worth charging for. (But don't let Dad go. He will buy as much as he sells ;)

Haul it to the Flea Market, and whatever people don't buy (or take for free :), that you can send to the recyclers. (I use ACCRC for my recycling needs, on account of they'll not only recycle the dreck, they'll probably find a cool use for any interesting/vintage parts that happen to show up... or even just build a skull out of old PC motherboards and flat panel displays.)