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

You call that hoarding?

[ComputerGeek01]

Only one closet full? Pfft, lightweight. Come back when you have a real collection!

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.

Re:You call that hoarding?

[Monkeedude1212]

I didn't even know this was a thing until now. My room mate came up to me the other day and casually told me "My cousin thinks we have a very geeky house" and I replied, "How come?", to which he responded, "Well, we've got 4 desktops here in our living room/kitchen, only 2 of which actually get any use. This doesn't include the laptops you and I normally use, and Mike has HIS own desktop in his bedroom. Not to mention the pile of 10 or so Programming books stacked on the coffee table here, and the remaining pieces of that printer we took apart for fun last weekend. We've got posters on the walls with cheeky jokes about what you've learned from video games."

And I told him, "Yeah, I guess its a bit messy, but I mean, I don't know if its all that geeky. I mean, what do other people have lying around?"

To which he replied, "Well my cousin has posters of girls in bikini's along his wall, and many many more empty pizza boxes. His X-box has Modern Warfare 2 in the tray, ours has the movie cube2:hypercube. Where we have our router, he keeps his stereo. There is no computer in visible sight, they are all tucked away into each others bedrooms. His coffee table is littered with empty beer bottles and plastic cups, one of which has a sticky ping pong ball in it. When people come over to play Age of Empires 2, he has chicks over, and probably bones them all."

So I retorted, "Your cousin sounds like a douche"

Anyways. Anecdotes aside, my house has about as much junk as that entire article shows, except for the last 2 pictures (which are of course the most impressive, I can't keep stuff that organized)

Re:You call that hoarding?

[ajlisows]

Funny thing is, I was a slight tech hoarder and my wife is a shoe/old clothes hoarder. If the clothes are wearable....even if they are more fit for a teenager....she keeps them. I harassed her to get rid of some of the stuff and she pointed out my collection of garbage. I decided to set a good example and one day started throwing out/selling/giving away/hitting with a bat most of the stuff in my tech pile. It was actually quite liberating. It is not longer difficult to find the actual USEFUL things that I rarely use amidst the piles of stuff I never used.

Never did get the wife to throw away the old clothes though. Oh well. At least it ensures that she keeps the school girl skirt. ;)

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.

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.

But, but,

[omarius]

I use a MicroVAX for an end table, you insensitive clod!

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.

AtariAge

[Hatta]

You think that's bad, you should check out some of the collections at AtariAge. People who have a dozen spare 800XLs "just in case". I've got to say this shit is impressive. This too.

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

[2obvious4u]

You can take your old computers to Best Buy and they will recycle them for you. No need to put them in a landfill. That is where I take all my old tech.

Here are some links:
news article
recycle information

Also note that if it has a screen they will charge you $10 to recycle it; however they give you a $10 gift card to use in the store as well - so it is a wash.

value

[leomekenkamp]

It would be interesting to find out if the reason why some of us are so attached to old hardware just might be that it was not long ago that that hardware was mind boggingly expensive. My brother sometimes took a IBM model 5155 home and let me play nethack on it. At that time you could buy a nice car for that money instead of such a beast.

More than 10 years later I got my hands on one of these, but sadly parted with it under the influence of my wife at the time. (Yup, we divorced.). Seeing a picture of it still fills me with awe thinking how expensive this machine once was. Maybe that awe combined with a but-it-still-works attitude makes us think twice about throwing such stuff away?

Now who will save the world?

[2obvious4u]

NO! I can't throw away my old Token Ring cards and cables! What happens when the world goes post apocalyptic and I have to connect to a legacy system to save the world from Skynet? I need all my old devices it is our only hope!

first sign of trouble

[jp102235]

The first sign of trouble is when you said/thought, at least I am not as bad as X. oh goodness.
The second sign: an intervention by way of watching a tv show devoted to your disease.
Take it from a former hoarder: just throw everything away (donate, trash, etc). There are way
more important things in life than, well, "things". Once you start spending as much time, energy,
and care for the people in and around your life, I doubt you will ever hoard again.

-sent from my cray-

Murphy's Law

[symes]

applies in this case. It states that an item's usefullness increases ten-fold as soon as it is thrown away. Hoarding is only natural.

That's not hoarding...

[Chelloveck]

Bah. Pikers! Look at those photos, you can clearly see the floor in some of them! No tech hoarder worthy of the title still has a visible floor.

Just mention "shoes"

[petes_PoV]

and the conversation will magically change direction, though you'll be even deeper in the doghouse

Re:Never fails

[delinear]

What I need is a real-life OS X trash can or the Windows Recycle Bin, so I can recover things right after I trash them.

I have one of those, only the other half prefers to refer to it as a "garage". Mind you, when it fills up the seek times are horrendous.

IBM System/36

[Foxxxy]

I recently was forced to part with my old IBM System 36 and corresponding hard drive that was 350lbs and the size of a dishwasher. The system 36 was the original 700lb model 5630. They were used as end tables but didn't fit with my wife's tastes. I am proud to say that I was able to get the box up, with connected terminal and actually pulled data off of it (printed) in 2005. I was challenged by some friends to make it work to show it could still be put to use and damn it, the yellow paged manuals I still had made it easy.

My tech hoarding earned me some extra income as I won the bet making it work. So don't throw it out, your tech buddies will pay good money to watch you fight with 20 year old tech.

Toxic waste

[plopez]

Considering that much of tech gadgets contain toxic waste, usually in the form of heavy metals, reusing them as furniture isn't a bad idea. It beats dumping them into a landfill or paying for recycling.

The tech industry is a filthy industry. Esp. when you factor in the planned obsolescence.

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

[SleazyRidr]

It a cost-benefit thing.

Keeping a few things that you might need is sensible. Keeping everything you've ever had isn't.

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.

It gets better...

[Angst Badger]

My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.

The best part is that if you look past the stack of machines he's using as an end table, you'll see the original wooden end table shoved ignominiously into the corner.

Re:I do the opposite of hoarding

[mrdoogee]

I like to arrange them next to each other—only with one slightly higher, so you get a two-level effect with a little path running down the middle.

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

[hldn]

be sure to salvage the strong magnets out of there as well. they're very useful. i took the two magnets from an old harddrive and used them to make a super strong money clip. it can securely hold 25 bills folded in half (50 layers!)

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

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

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;

Are you bragging or trying to piss people off? I have an empty shelf in my hoarding room just crying for an A4000 and 1200. I can't even win one on eBay and you're tossing them out....

Different direction

[SuperKendall]

NO! I can't throw away my old Token Ring cards and cables! What happens when the world goes post apocalyptic and I have to connect to a legacy system to save the world from Skynet?

I totally thought you were going to say you couldn't just throw the Token Ring cards away because you had to make sure they were disposed of properly in Mt Doom.