Journal: News & Comment

It's all crrrrrrrrap!

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Today I spent 10 hours (!) cleaning out my geek office downstairs, which has accumulated boxes and crates of old electronic equipment, as well as a lot of miscellaneous junk. I'm not even finished yet, and I suspect there may be a trip to Ikea in my future for shelves and drawers to hold the stuff I'm not getting rid of. (There are still three boxes of musical gear, keyboards, miscellaneous wires, mice, and accessories I couldn't bring myself to junk.)

Amid the gear I am ditching, aside from the huge heap of recyclable cardboard, there are not one, but two 20-year-old semi-working computers (plus several more of newer vintage), a box of actually-floppy 5.25" floppy disks, several functioning and non-functioning CRT monitors and inkjet printers that are either obsolete or don't work anymore, and dozens and dozens of cables, some of which probably ceased being useful before some of today's programmers were even born (PhoneTalk anyone?).

Finding this vintage 1993 GeoPort Telecom Adapter was amusing when comparing it to the USB modem Apple introduced last week—which is (I think) the only external Apple modem released in the 12 years since I got the one pictured here. The GeoPort Telecom Adapter worked at 9600 kbps, then 14.4 kbps, then 28.8 kbps (through software upgrades) and depending on the DSP chip in Macs of that era. I used it until 1998 on my Mac Centris 660AV, which is in one of the boxes.

I dragged the cardboard to the Burnaby Recycling Depot this morning, and I'm probably going to haul the electronics out to Electronics Recycling in Surrey on Tuesday, October 18. If you have a perverse desire to add any of it to your own geek office, email me or leave a comment. If you want to trade for a filing cabinet, hey, I'm game.

And don't worry. The retro '70s "Fantasy 500" organ is going to a good home at my parents' place.

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