RIP computers

I’ve had stacks upon stacks of computer parts in my basement office for years. Every now and then I’d go through and purge the old stuff, but still they filled my closet and shelves. Now that we’re preparing to move, it’s time to get serious.

This morning I filled four big bins with old computers, monitors, and parts that I’ll take for recycling.

It’s funny to see that I still have my old IOMega Zip drive (those things were the bomb back in the day, when all we had was floppy disks to move data between computers). Of course there are stacks of floppy drives, video cards, and I even found an old 14.4k baud modem. Yeah, I’m so glad I’ve saved that for almost 30 years.

I found my very first computer’s motherboard, complete with the original 386 chip running at a screaming 33MHz:

And my first laptop, a sweet Toshiba that weighs about as much as four modern laptops:

This puppy is the one I used to start this blog, way back in 2002. I’d sit on my bed clacking away, writing blog posts. I’d take it on trips and plug in the PCMCIA modem and dial into NetZero to check email in Netscape Mail and browse the web in Navigator. Yep, those were the days.

Now all this stuff is heading off to Best Buy, which is the closest place I could find that recycles computer parts. I wonder if any of them will recognize some of these antiques…