I just cleared out my office/man cave and O the ancient technology. I never throw any of this shit away. The exciting things I found:
2011 Mac Mini (you know I tried to sell this and forgot, sorry interested person, remind me and it's yours)
2008 Mac Mini (maybe 2007) - once upon a time a media server, wo uld a l mo s t str ea m HD. I think I have myself a new fancy 'design icon' paperweight/house plant stand.
A random hard disk. Probably ASCII smut judging by the IDE interface.
Two Blackberry Curves from the mothership in the age before mobile policy enlightenment. I 'lost' one in the hope they'd give me something better as a replacement. They didn't.
One ancient Siemens A55 mobile phone. Orange Wednesdays at Valley Centertainment ftw.
A Motorola house brick phone (my first mobile!) with aerial that's probably big enough to qualify as a dildo (don't put that in your back pocket, not least because it wouldn't fit).
One Asus mini laptop thing. It was slow when it was new. Factory refurb, arrived smelling like a 50 year old Chinese chain smoker (I checked the box, he wasn't included). Possibly it used cigarette tar as storage medium. Used some weird Asus distro of Linux that they promptly disowned. I put some variant of Ubuntu on it and it didn't so much as slow down further as stop. It's probably still installing an update from 2012.
Ancient in-car sat-nav. About the size of a GPS satellite. Honestly, I've no idea how we saw out the windscreeen. I don't think we ever used it, it's not like we drive any further than the supermarket or the Crystal Palace pool and at this point the car probably knows its own way.
Three (!) Palm Pilots (sounds so wrong) - an m100, a Tungsten E2, and a T|X. O glory days before smartphones. Children, ask your parents.
Lots of cables. An entire straining carrier bag of electrical intestines. I don't think I ever had a SCSI device but it seems I was prepared for the eventuality.
European kettle plug adaptors. Why do I keep them? Fear of some EU masterplan to remove our big prongs? How would we hurt our feet stumbling to the bathroom in the dark?
One thousand (ish) USB sticks. I suffer from a compulsion and grab handfuls of them at every conference from our marketing grab bag. You can't have too many of them, eh? OK evidently you can and I'm proof.
A picture of a very young me with long curly hair and a jacket that looks like it was stolen from the set of Miami Vice. I laughed for seventeen minutes and thirty seven seconds. I'm going to show it my wife later, I reckon she'll burst something important. Then we'll burn it.
There's a PowerMac G4 but that's in the summer house at the top of the garden. I'd use this as a paperweight, but you try lifting one, it has a heatsink the size of a engine block.
Power adaptors that are either non-functional or for devices of which I know not.
A smashed Apple Mighty Mouse (dropped it and it bounced down the glass stairs of the mothership) – for some reason, unexplained as I had a replacement, I was going to fix it. I have never fixed anything ever and I'm not sure why I ever thought it would be a good idea that I start.
Headphones, so many headphones.
A BT router.
A TallkTalk router.
Some Philips portable speakers, evidently pre-dating Bluetooth judging by the wire spaghetti.
Authentic Windows 95/98/XP disks. Office 95. Photoshop 6, PageMaker 6.5, and Quark 4 (sans dongle). A whole pile of geriatric software.
Floppy disks (children, ask your grandparents). I have no idea why I'd want my email from 1995, but I have it.
It's like a really sad version of the Generation Game where the cuddly toy has run off. Why do I keep this stuff, why have I not thrown it away? Anyway, I put it all in the box, you know, just in case.