Cool stuff you have found.

[soulestream]

I was at a clients the other day checking some stuff and they had found a box,that they wanted me to go through before they threw it away to make sure there was nothing important. The box had memos in it from 1989 so i was about to throw away the box(old printer manuals, box for a math coprocessor upgrade for a 386 processor, etc) when a found a complete set including box and manuals for DOS 3.2. It was the fist OS i used as a kid. So i brought it home. I was wondering if anybody else ever finds little "jewels" in other peoples garbage





soule

[madcompnerd]

Once I was assigned to rip apart a large number of machines for a job. I found an old black-box IBM PC with dual 5.25" drives and an 8086 processor.
Now, I knew my mom would kill me if I drug the whole thing home, so I just ripped the proc out and kept it. Lately I've been curious if the thing would have ran!

I run all my network drives off of a machine I bought from my highschool right before I graduated. They used to run 4 year old installs of Win98 and they were unbelievably slow (so slow that broadband felt like a bad dial-up connection). Now it runs all my nfs mounts, ftp server, and maybe I'll start running some downloads (University bandwidth) off it soon! For a long time I used it as a VNC server to do my coding on. The first c++ coding I ever did was on it, same with, unfortunately, the first VB coding. Amazing what three times thhe RAM and linux can do for a win98 machine! Oh, and they gave Win95 licenses with them. I later sold my license for $5.

I never get any cool old stuff from people; but a lot of times I am successful in getting their old computer which is often not a bad machine that is very useful to me.

[Sepero]

Ummm... this one time, at a restaraunt, I felt under the table and found some gum...

[DSwain]

I don't think I ever found anything very interesting in piles of stuff, but the one nice thing I did find one time was in some old 486 machine. Apparently, some type of HP, or at least the floppy disk drive was. At the time, I needed a drive that simply worked, and this was my last find. It ended up being the highest quality floppy disk I ever used. Always worked for me perfectly, and was dead silent. I could barely hear it at all. I don't really use floppies much anymore, but it was very nice to have at the time.

[bs_texas]

Back when I was a kid in the 60's, I was riding my bike and noticed something shiny along the edge of the road. It was an 1889 Silver Dollar. :eek:

[hard candy]

I would not call it a "jewel", I did find a Packard "Hell" multimedia Pentium Pro. Fired it up, started flashing back to previous experiences, and took it back to the dumpster.
Got a Nokia 19" CRT monitor, still using it today. Very good monitor.

[techwise]

One time as a kid in the 60s, I was riding my bike to the store to spend a silver dollar I took from my dad. But I must have lost it on the side of the road. It was gone when I got there. He was mad because it was old, like from 1889 or something.

Besids the usual pc stuff people put on the curb, nothing too interesting, except a cool Cremo Cigar shipping box that looks like a trunk.

m

[robagen]

Near some dumpsters in NYC, which contained some discarded computers,
I saw someone taking one of the monitors home. He was strapping
it to his 10-speed(optimist).:D

I've found about $200 worth of working items in NYC dumpsters. One
has to be careful..sharp edges, etc.;)

[gehidore]

Originally posted by Sepero
Ummm... this one time, at a restaraunt, I felt under the table and found some gum...

You know, my older sister doesn't chew gum because her best friend when they were 8 crawled under the table at dennys and came back out with a mouth full of gum :/

[dannybunkins]

I found a 24 port network hub in a dumpster about a month ago. It's only 10-base but it still works like a charm.

[El_Cu_Guy]

This was about 13 years ago. After my mom got remarried, the back garage door (you had to walk through the garage to get to the basement) of the guy's house leaked really bad and the basement floor was soaked and so were the boxes sitting on the floor.

While I was helping to clean it out I came across one of those really old home computer. It was one of those old junkers that you plug into your tv, used it's own basic. It still had the old manual and connectors for a tape recorder. Oh how I wish I still had that thing. However, those who watch That 70s Show may have seen it featured in one of the episodes. Can't remember the model number for the life of me. He let me have it.

Later I would find this beauty in the garage which he let me have as well

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/commodore_cbm-8032_1.jpg

[SeT]

I find all kinds of crap around the office. I've got an old 8086 proc sitting at my desk. Had a 66mhz(I think) Texas Instruments laptop. There are several sealed boxes of 5.25 floppies. I've found sealed boxes of MS Dos. Found a sealed box "Microshaft Winblows 98" (in quotes because I don't use those lame jabs - that was actually on the box.)

[XiaoKJ]

My own sch had just given up usable PCs (pentiums that are too old for win XP, but ran RH9 very very well) due to stupid guys are Ministry of Edu, and so the stuff would be sold cheap to rag-n-bone man. I took out a lot of net cards from them, which are very much working with the WOL cable attached.

HD that are working too, Zip 250, floppy drive

[Sgood1971]

The coolest thing I ever found was a complete box set of OS/2 on floppies at work while they were cleaning the 'junk' room. The most valuable would have to be an older Toshiba satellite that I am still running DamnSmall Linux on.

[tlyons]

Originally posted by Sgood1971
a complete box set of OS/2 on floppies at work

Loved OS/2 <sigh>.

Thankfully there was Linux to go to as OS/2 went into the (inevitable) spiral of death.

Anyway (suddenly on topic), my neighbour threw out not one, but two working computers -- a Canon 486DX/66 and an IBM Model 365 Pentium Pro 200. Neither would boot of course, but it seems to have been from amateur meddling rather than legitimate system failure. Once the HDD/CD master/slave conflict was corrected in the 486, and I flashed the bios and reinstalled an OS on the IBM, both work fine. Still do.

- T.

[evac-q8r]

Once upon a time I stumbled upon an OS called Linux...

EVAC