Stuff

If you’ve heard George Carlin’s “Stuff” routine, and can relate to it, you might be able to picture this scene:

This weekend my brother and I decided to lower the “Stuff” level in our “storage area” (read: front porch) by a foot or two. Really.

We are collectors. Not in the professional sense, but more in the “see something that might be worthwhile and take it home” sense. Mostly we do this with computers and their related parts. More often than not these are Apple Macintosh items, although occasionally we’ve been known to let a PC slip through.

We spent most of Saturday pulling things outside, testing them (plug in, turn on, whoops I guess that one doesn’t work, cannibalize, repeat) and adding most of them to the pile of garbage. By the end of our session we had cleared about a foot and a half of height from our front porch, uh, I mean, storage area, and ended up with a pile of working 72-pin SIMMs (archaic, yes, but they’re still useful for something!), a Mac floppy drive or two, a few HUGE 230MB — 500MB SCSI drives (whoo-hoo!) and a working Mac 6000-series, and one generic PC (Pentium 1 I think) that works, but needs a larger hard drive if we want to use it for anything (like, say, RedHat).

This doesn’t include all the stuff we put back in the trunk of my car (a Mac Classic, a Mac 128k motherboard, Mac II, Mac IIcx, a few old SCSI hard drives, original Mac keyboards and mice, etc.) which may someday be tested, and of course is potentially useful until that day arrives.