My company’s first IT guy - he was hired when the company was created in the mid 80s - retired after a lifetime of very competent IT work.
The man was a bit of a packrat, and there was a mountain of old computer cruft in his office and in his storage spaces.
We cleared all those spaces last week and I saved a few things, like a pair of Apple IIs with the original monitors and joysticks, because I had one when I was a teenager - so ya know, for memory’s safe.
But I let the rest go to the landfill because, while I know a lot of that crap has some value today, there was so much of it and I simply didn’t have time to catalog everything and put it up for sale on behalf of the company. Not to mention, I’m generally not a fan of old stuff: I had to suffer it when it was the only thing around and I’m glad it’s gone personally.
The last pile however, I finally decided to save: it’s 4 big cardboard boxes full of new unopened boxes of 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppies and written ones (maybe 500 of each blank and 500 with something on em), 10 NOS 3 1/2 floppy drives and one nondescript beige PC with a 5 1/4 drive, another 3 1/2 drive and a DVD burner in the bays.
My plan is to image what’s worth imaging (probably not much) that’s still readable (probably not much either) then format and recondition the written disks and sell them all when I have free time, and just keep a couple of 3 1/2 drives and the 5 1/4 for myself (because I’m a bit of a packrat too 🙂) and sell the other 8 3 1/2 drives.
Or I could simply sit on them until they become truly rare 🙂
Anybody has any idea what that junk might be worth today?
I took a closer look at the nondescript beige box I rescued yesterday before leaving work and it’s not that nondescript after all: it a Pentium4 running XP Pro, it has some sort of Adaptec SCSI card in it and it has a DAT drive:
Looking at the login names, I think it might be the old backup server.
@ExtremeDullard A friend of mine was just buying a pack of unopened floppies the other week, so yeh there’s the interest; don’t think they’ll get a vast amount each.
I’d say probably somewhere round about nothing
if a 3.5 floppy drive hasnt been accessed in 10 years, chances are the data is corrupted
if they were kept in a really good stable environment, they might still be good. But a fridge magnet can ruin the data. they are fragile beasts when they don’t get their magnetic field reset every so often.
but as blank stock? worthless
there is a lot of it still out in the world and almost nobody uses it
Yeah that’s kind of what I figured.
I know some professionals pay a pretty penny to buy floppies to keep old equipment going - like old CNC machine tools - but they don’t pay more than actual pretty pennies.
Oh well… I’ll install DOS on the beige box and keep it around in case we ever have to access old media. And when the boxes of floppies get in my way, I’ll toss them too I guess.
you can still buy brand new floppies for this purpose. anyone that’s doing this is just going to fork out for brand new because they need a stable supply chain, and a guaranteed quality
I disagree with this. New old stock floppies that have been stored properly are becoming increasingly difficult to find, especially 5.25" media. There are a lot of hobbyists out there that would love to get a hold of them for use with their retro systems. You should sell them on, not throw them away.
That’s not my intention. But my office is only so big and my employer doesn’t really approve of the clutter I have in here. And I’m not bringing that stuff home. If I need to clear the place, I will. But I won’t throw them away: I’ll probably give them to some local retro-computing enthusiast, provided they come get the disks.
I’ve read two dozen disks and they read just fine. A lot of them have obscure drivers and stuff. I’ll upload them somewhere. I think this Youtuber Tech Tangent has some sort of archive going. Maybe I can upload that stuff there.
Meanwhile, I’m installing 32-bit Debian on that P4 machine I salvaged: it’s quite loaded for its time, with two 160G HDDs and 2G of RAM, a nice graphics card and all 🙂
But I let the rest go to the landfill because, while I know a lot of that crap has some value today, there was so much of it and I simply didn’t have time to catalog everything and put it up for sale on behalf of the company.
I don’t get this. Wouldn’t such old hardware be ridiculously cheap to buy in bulk and classify at your own pace? There’s probably people who would pay for getting it off your hands and classify it themselves.
There were two problems:
- I didn’t have the space to store all that stuff while I catalog it. There was 3 roomfuls of it, honestly.
- I’m not interested in sifting through old computer stuff, much less taking photos of the items, pricing them, listing them on eBay, then packaging them and shipping them. Someone who enjoys old computers would already find this tedious benedictine work and I don’t.
I did tell my company they should hire a college student in the summer to do it, but here’s the thing: only people my age know what most of those things were, and all the people my age I know - including me - have much higher paying jobs and don’t want to be doing that.
So in the end, my company decided to reclaim the space and get rid of it all.
Such a shame, but thank you for replying with additional context.
They’re already pretty rare, and likely to be in demand my hobbyists, I think?
