Clean up….
Several weeks ago a hot water line busted in the ceiling above my office/radio shack. While I caught it quickly enough to prevent any serious equipment damage, I pretty much ripped out about a 1/3 of the ceiling finding the leak and creating enough room to fix it. I called in the pro’s to re-do the dry wall on the ceiling and decided since I had already emptied the room, I might as well replace the carpet as well. So this weekend I have been ‘completely’ emptying the room and prepping the ceiling to paint it tomorrow.
This has of course meant the relocation of everything in my office to the family room. And a massive clean out has take place over the last two weeks as this process has occurred. Today I finally got down to emptying the closet and I have found some really interesting items.
- Two SupraFaxModems, one a older 14.4 and a newer 28.8
- A proto-type 3Com USB 56k “Puma” modem
- A stack of audio cards, covering ISA and PCI buses
- A very old 3Com 305(?) ISA NIC
- So many ‘spare’ wall warts I don’t know what to-do with all of them
- A prototype USB ZIP drive (I am not even sure they actually made it to market) and a pile of ZIP disks
- A stack of CDROM drives (mostly IDE)
- A stack of 3.5 floppy drives
- A pile at least a foot high of various kinds of ribbon cables
Most of the stuff went straight into the garage, I think there has been at least three garage bags take out so far. I kept the USB modem and the SupraFaxModems for sentimental reason. I am now going through the ZIP drives before tossing them. I was amazed that my Windows 7 netbook was able to enumerate the drive and read all the ZIP disks so far. To me that is actually even amazing than the ZIP drive actually working, even though it is a prototype and has been sitting on a shelf for decades. Most of the disks have been blank, so I am thinking this isn’t the first time I have gone through them. Actually all but one of the disks has been blank.