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?

  • ExtremeDullardOP
    5·
    5 days ago

    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.