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 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 🙂