#“Today I "Attic-ed" Some Of My Favourite Old Tech”
I did a big clean out of one of our big cubby holes upstairs that held a lot of my old tech from the past few years. Anything that was already of no practical use had been moved to the attic when we originally moved to Cork back in 2004. This stuff was in the "well you never know, I _might_ need it some day". And of course I never did need it. So the next batch headed to their Toy Story 3 fate in the attic.
As I packed them up, I took pics of some the ones that I have strong memories of. Here they are:
Dell Inspiron 3700. Never the best laptop but travelled the world with me in the early 00s. Bulletproof. Still works. I could not find a Dell latop that had the right mix of price and performance recently. They really seem to have lost the plot.
A generic crappy floppy disk drive. I posted this because if you look closely, you'll see I bought it from Dabs in 2000. I've been a customer for over 11 years. I've given them tons of business and referrals and yet their customer service has been completely AWOL over the missing PSU I ordered two weeks ago. If they don't sort it out asap, I'm never buying from them again.
Palm Tungsten T. A truly wonderful PDA. The best industrial design I've ever seen in such a product. Doing what Apple does with the iPhone, a long long time before them
A WinTV video grabber card. How many of these devices have I bought over the years and I never use them to the degree I plan? Hauppauge also write the worst software I have ever used.
Memories of unscrewing the phone wall-plate in a ropey pub B&B in Ely Cambridgeshire in 1998 so I could connect my laptop with crocodile clips at some joke of a speed to grab my mail back in Dublin. We were helping to get the first Toshiba-powered OnDigital box launched. I also figured out how to make this card work with Windows 2000 after Psion told me they wouldn't support Win2k. Hence it was the last Psion related product I ever bought.
I bought this multimeter around 1984 from Maplin by mail-order so I could build add-on cards for my ZX Spectrum. Still works perfectly. Partially responsible for me doing Electronic Engineering in UCD.
Redhat 8.0 eh? 2003. Cannot remember why I named a machine "bejing". My first Linux install was Slackware in 1996 when I was in Sunnyvale. A horror to install and configure.
An "Enterprise" level 10Mbs Wifi router. Interesting design, has a removable PCMCIA card in it. I had big plans to use this for that point-to-point wireless community network that people were trying to kick off in 2002/2003. Never happened. I think these came out around the time 3Com decided they were getting out of the networking business and going to put all their efforts into an Internet Appliance called Audrey. Ahhh, I miss the insanity of the 1998-2001 tech bubble.
Great wee networking card. Back in the day when laptops didn't have lan ports.
From 1996 to 2006, I bought a lot of gear in the US on my visits. Mainly in Fry's but also Best Buy and CompUSA. So of course I needed a US power strip.
Bloody Avoca phone. Never liked it :-)
My wonderful Casio FX700G graphing calculator. Bought in a big electronics store on Koenig Strasse in Stuttgart in 1988 when I spent the summer in Esslingen working in an old folks home. This calculator got me through a bunch of exams in UCD. I'm still rubbish at stats tho. I tried powering it up with new batteries today but no joy. Gutted.
Fuji Endeavor APS camera. My last non-digital camera. Solid but not spectacular. Think I got it in the States?
Ahh, who doesn't have one of these Nokia data cables?
I tried many times to switch to this trackball to deal with my RSI. I never stuck with it tho. I think I got this one in 2002.
My last walkman.
So there you have it. Nothing massively out of the ordinary but still feels odd putting them away. I wonder when my HTC Desire, Kindle and EeePC 701 will have the same fate?