Have a hard time letting go of old tech?
Was rifling through a drawer looking for a printer cord and came across my old school calculator. This Sharp Elsimate 201 was my pride and joy. I think I got it in junior high so about 1975. And for a 50 yr old calculator it still does exactly what it should.
Then I realized how much old tech I have that I have an emotional attachment to. I still have a Mac Plus and a Mac SE as well as an Imagewriter dot matrix printer and about a hundred 3.5" floppies sitting in a closet. I loved the first time I tried a Mac after the frustration of using DOS on a 286 PC. It just seemed like light years of improvement to actually use a mouse and playing with MacPaint was magical. I sometimes got chided for being a Mac evangelist at university and many people thought Apple would be crushed by Microsoft - looks like they're doing just fine.
My Marantz stereo is about the same vintage, mid 70s, and the Yamaha speakers still sound as good as the first day I fired them up. That stereo was built back when 22 watts per side was actual output and its loud enough to shake the walls. None of this "300 watts" fakery that came along when boom boxes became a thing. Plenty of distortion and zero fidelity is easy, quality sound takes quality engineering.
What have you got laying around that you just dont want to get rid of?
When I moved overseas, I had a chance to clean out my house and rent multiple dumpsters.
I had an old Amiga 500 that I could not sell locally, which got recycled.
Tons of radio and telephony equipment, as well as old computers.
Cables. I had old HP-IB/GP-IB cables. A couple spools of cat5, cat7 cable.
DVD players. My PS2.
Nothing like moving to motivate you to dump stuff that you've been accumulating.
So true. I dread the day we have to move. I've read about the concept of 'Swedish death cleaning' and it makes sense. Going through your things to clear the clutter long before time so your benefactors don't have to.
Quick Ebay search and someones got a fresh out of the box Amiga 500 selling for $800
My s/o has an old one somewhere but its been sitting in not-climate-controlled storage for many years so I doubt it still works. Still, s/o swears its probably worth a fortune and wont ever get rid of it.
I had the RTC and memory expansion card, which included a small battery. After 25+ years, I kind of worry that the battery went bad and leaked all over the expansion card :(
Usually after that long, the capacitors dry out.
Starting around 2007, I have what I've come to call the "Tech Karma Closet". Over time I was starting to accrue a bunch of old tech that I didn't personally need via various means, from my early professional career working with consumer electronics brands, to regular personal tech upgrade cycles, to my nerdy personal hobby of buying outdated gadgets to play with that I was too poor to have back when they were new. It all started taking up a bunch of space in my living room closet: PC parts, laptops, monitors, older phones and media players, about a jillion pairs of headphones of all price ranges and form factors, NASes, routers, etc. All of it worked perfectly, I just didn't have an existing use for it.
So in 2007 I started a process of selling some of it locally via online classifieds to make room, and whatever I found I couldn't sell quickly enough, I would give away to people who needed it. It wasn't unusual at the time that I'd hear about a friend or a friend of a friend or a coworker or a friend of a coworker mention that some tech thing they had broke, or that they needed an upgrade to something ancient they were using but couldn't afford it yet, and I'd offer them something out of my closet that would fit the bill even if it was just to cover the spread until they could get the replacement thing they needed.
After a while, it'd happened enough that I kind of got a reputation for it, to the point that people who had old stuff laying around just offered it to me to hang onto until I could find someone who needed it. At that point, I more or less stopped selling anything online and only donated equipment to other people in need (and even a couple of local small businesses and nonprofits here and there) as a form of material aid. Someone dropped their phone and can't afford another one yet. Someone's kid needs a laptop for school. That kind of thing. I started calling it my Tech Karma closet because it did come around--more than once over the years I myself found I needed something for whatever reason and someone would just give it to me.
I'm still doing it, and the large double closet in my home office now houses all of the gear, to the point that I bought and built a new shelving system for it about 18 months ago. I do have a hard time letting go of stuff I haven't been able to give away--I definitely hang onto the idea of "either someone will eventually need this, or I will"--but I try to keep things cycling through.
The Tech Karma Closet, what a great idea. Love that.
My Gameboy Color still gets a fair amount of use and it is my go-to device for use on travel (though the Playdate might give it a run for its money). That is 30ish years old now? I am also working on getting a WiFi cartridge for it for some new development.
I regularly work with a lathe from sometime in the 1940s to do minor metalwork for one off jobs. It does exactly what it needs to and no more. I did add a digital readout to it like 15 years ago but it stopped working when the building got hit by lightning.
For me is quartz watches with monochrome displays, I used a smartwatch for a while until I realized the nonsense it was to have to recharge it often and how much time notifications took of my life, the smart features basically didn't add much either, sleep tracker, I already feel if I rested well, calories burned, a scale will be more reliable, the rest of functions are basically covered by my smartphone.
I could use a Casio F-19, the best price/durability/reliability watch ever made, but I wanted something similar with countdown for training, right now I use an incredibly cheap Skmei 1628 that at the moment of writing costs only 8,69€ (I've seen it cheaper on sale, and batteries alone could cost me that in EU), it does exactly what I need, time and chronometers with a long battery life.
Initially I wanted to buy the equivalent Casio, after some YouTube reviews, I was convinced that the Chinese clone was as good for a fraction of the price.
I'm not much into watches, but I love my Timex Expedition. Simple, easy to read, excellent backlight, cheap, light and comfortable.
I loved the Pebble way back, but mine finally gave up the ghost and I don't need all the fancy stuff other smart watches have, plus being relieved of thinking about charging is very nice.
Cautiously optimistic about the Pebble coming back but waiting for the next version I think. Have definitely gotten a bit addicted to my Garmin data since my old Pebble got retired.
Man, Pebble was the coolest. Pebble is what ultimately led to me getting interested into mechanical watches back in high school. I'm 25 so, when I was really young, people still wore watches a lot but I was too young to need one, and then by the time I would've needed one everyone had a smartphone. I got the Pebble because I saw it on Reddit or something when I was like 14 and thought it was super cool. A year or two later the Apple Watch came out and I bought that, but eventually I decided I didn't really need the notifications and I've worn a mechanical watch (almost) daily for the past ~12? years.
Oh man, I shouldn't read threads like this. I struggle to get rid of anything but now I really want that Skmei. A G-Shock without all the branding and at 1/10 of the price? sigh I might be buying more tech that I'll have a hard time letting go of.
There are some categories of products where I have been acquiring more, not getting rid of it. I think I am younger than most of the people in this thread, so I don’t have many older devices that I grew up with. But modern calculators are not good, and I sometimes like the feel of a physical calculator. So I now have two old HP RPN calculators. My pride and joy is a HP 11C scientific calculator.
Hello fellow RPN enjoyer! Me and my HP 48SX salute you. I bought mine in 1992 with my accumulated summer job savings, and still happily use and enjoy it to this day. :)
[edit] DId you know there's a company making modern clones of HP's RPN line? https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
I did know about Swiss micro. I am so happy that at least one company is keeping the dream alive. I have been debating getting their updated model of the HP48 (with usb c!). I’ve been avoiding it to keep my money for school, but I may grab it before I head back to the US.
Why would you get rid of things if they still work and you like them? Things like calculators have personal attachment to them. There are people who like classic HP calculators that there are still companies who make clones of them.
That being said, I have grown to lose my attachment to a lot of my possessions, so most of my old electronics are gone. I gave my Amiga A3000 system to a friend recently and the only retro computers I still have are an ancient 286 plasma-screen portable system buried in a closet, an iMac that I can't even find in the garage at this point, and a Sharp PC-1262. I used to have about 20 different retro computers but I have replaced them with a MiSTer and emulation.
It's a mix for me. I have a lot of old computers, as well as several old consoles around my house. My old computers (I'm talking about 12ish years old at maximum) still see frequent use, my consoles, much less so. I also have some speakers, I think from the 90s? Advent Laureate, which I've refoamed and are still doing duty everyday in my Den.
I'll keep and use things as they remain useful. Once they stop serving my needs, I'll recycle or sell them on; but I think a lot of old technology can still be quite useful this day and age, I'm not the type to upgrade just because of a new fancy thing.
I was putting away a box of stuff after having moved (4 years ago cough cough) and came across something I had completely forgotten about: I still have an original Tetris cartridge (with travel case) for the Game Boy. I don't have anything I can play it on, though I do still have my old DS Lite and Pokémon Fire Red for the GBA, which I might fire up again some time.
Anyway, at this point, I'm really just holding on to Tetris for nostalgia's sake. It makes a novel bit of clutter for my shelf.
I know how you feel. Ever since a tech friend of mine jokingly asserted that "The retrocomputing threat level is now orange - all hardware made before the Opteron is now classed as 'Don't throw it out even if it's broken, you'll regret it'" I've been maintaining and cleaning my old tech every now and again. An IBM-compatible, a Mac Performa 200, a few old amplifiers and radios - and I'm reminded every time that they truly don't make them like they used to.
Old mp3 players by Cowon and iRiver still live in my cupboard.
I still have one that has FM radio before the powers that be decided that we shouldn't have access to radio on our portable devices.
Wise choice. If I was in the states, I'd think about shortwave and HAM too if things begin to look any sillier.
I just found my original iPod video that I am going to try and replace the battery for, I loved that thing dearly and it got a ton of use back in the day.
I’m also rocking a beige nostalgia machine running windows XP that is set up to look like it’s running windows 95. To go along with it I have a CRT monitor that I love to play old computer games on.
I have a ton of retro consoles that get a bit of use. Sega (my favorite), n64, gameboy color, and an OG Wii with homebrew. I’m in the process of looking for a CRT TV for the consoles.
I have a drawer full of various old gameboy and gbc flash cart tech (writers, carts, cables). They all use parallel and serial ports that most modern computers no longer feature. They are also mostly obsoleted by things like R4DS and the myriad of handheld devices that have been released over the years. But I still hang on to them for some reason.