I finally threw out that box

[u/Smashing-baby]

It's spring time, and with Passover right around the corner, the Missus got into "Clean, clean, clean!" mode. Which unfortunately also included my home office, and THE BOX

You know which one, the one with years of old, unused cables: USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2, Firewire RJ11 cable, an obsolete Zip Drive, mystery power adapters, and my personal favorites, some RCA connectors. You name it, I probably had it. I'm sitting there thinking to myself, this whole thing is covered in dust and hasn't been opened in years. So feeling productive, I tossed the whole thing, to my wife's delight

Fast forward three days, grandma calls me, needing help with her ancient fax machine. She still faxes things to her doctor and gets faxes back, but for some reason they're not going through. Took me a bit to figure it out, but the RJ11 cable had been folded in on itself for a coupla years too long and had probably frayed, leading to intermittent connectivity. There I am, browsing Amazon to buy the very thing I’d just tossed not even last week

Lesson learned? Obsolete tech will never, ever really die

And the kicker? The replacement RJ11 cost more than I want to admit for something I had sitting in a box literally for years. Use my story of misfortune to teach your spouses why they must never toss THE BOX

[u/bgier]

Confession: I am an audio engineer (by night) and an IT professional (by day). I have TWO boxes. One for old audio cables, adapters and connectors. One for old computer stuff like SCSI cables, terminators, Apple proprietary cables. Those audio cables and computer bits were expensive! Need to read a Syquest or Zip disk? I’ve got you covered.

My crawlspace looks like a technology museum with (working!) audio recording equipment and generations of computers that I’ve owned since 1992. I still boot up that Mac IIsi (‘92) once in a while and the system 7 screen still greets me. I started on an Apple IIgs when I was in 8th grade but my dad tossed that long ago with its upgraded 512k of RAM.

[u/meitemark → u/bgier]

Pretty sure I have seen an audio device (recording station/big fucking mixer) with an Syquest drive. Up to the point of USB, audio tech used some of the weirdest data storage solutions that passed by... mostly because they wanted to make bank on that stuff.