What is it with me and keeping old computer hardware? And I don’t mean hardware that’s just slightly out of date, nor things that would commonly be considered vintage or retro. I’m thinking of Pentium II- or III-era PCs and their components: these are way out of date for any real day-to-day usage, but also aren’t really pieces of equipment that might be nice to have for nostalgia reasons, for running old DOS or Windows 9x games. So, what’s the point?

I have started cleaning out, started throwing things away – some things I had forgotten about, some I knew I still had somewhere, but regardless of what they are exactly, a lot of it is junk. For example, there’s an old, chunky cordless phone, 20 years old or so, which hasn’t been in use for about 15 of these, and for which I can’t find the power supply anymore. So, why am I reluctant to throw it away? Because it used to belong to my grandparents. I don’t even remember how I ended up with it, but the two of them were really important to me during my childhood, moreso than my father just because of proximity (as my parents were never married, I lived with my mother, and we didn’t live in the same town). My grandmother passed away almost 15 years ago to the date, and my grandfather has been living in a rather far away retirement home since not long after her passing. So, this stupid cordless phone is a physical reminder, a tangible memento of sorts of them – and in turn, of my childhood, of the town, of their apartment, the evenings spent with them, and so on.

Now, thinking about that phone, the memories related to it in turn called forth related memories, such as finishing the Pokémon Trading Card Game for Game Boy on New Year’s Eve, 2000 to 2001, at my grandparents’ place, or getting my original Nintendo 64 from them for Christmas that year. The difference here, between these related memories and the objects associated with them, and the cordless phone, is that my N64 is still with me, working fine, ready to be played at any time. And while I lost that particular copy of the Pokémon TCG – or it was stolen, also a possibility – I do have another copy that I could play on the same Game Boy Pocket I had back in 2000. Basically, the phone doesn’t have a real world use anymore, while the other things do. And my memories are, for better or worse, just that: memories. Memories that I don’t need a physical object for to recall them.

So… I think I’ll be throwing that old phone away. It’s not wasting much space, but I need to draw a line somewhere. It’ll probably be a curvy one, depending on the exact thing that’ll try to cross it, but it needs to be there. Which brings us back to the computer hardware I started this post with, before drifting off into two paragraphs about my life. It felt good to write them down, though.

I have already started gutting and trashing some of the old PCs and cases in my basement, namely a somewhat recent but flimsy silver tower case – bought new in 2009 or thereabouts – and an older, beige desktop case. The silver one had a Pentium D 805 with matching mainboard still in it, while the desktop still had a dual processor board with two Pentium III 700 MHz, both of which I ended up moving over to different cases in better condition, to again serve as the bases for proper, working machines. However, there’s still at least two more incomplete machines left – another Pentium III desktop and a Pentium 4 tower –, which will likely be stripped of at least some of their parts and then trashed. I’ll probably be keeping a couple other mainboards and CPUs, some for some limited usefulness (such as flashing AGP video card firmware), some for nostalgia reasons, but I’ll try to divest myself from anything that’s neither useful as a spare part nor small enough to be crammed into a box or drawer somewhere.

There’s also a couple laptops and several Macintosh systems in various states of functionality or disrepair. The laptops I might keep all of, not least because they’re quite compact compared to a big desktop computer, although there’s one – a Celeron 400 MHz, currently running Windows 2000 – that might end up getting gutted and trashed as well, because it’s in rather bad shape. I will certainly be keeping my PowerBook 3400c/200, as it has been quite a useful troubleshooter for many issues I’ve had with the other Macs over the last half a year, since I started “reactivating” them one by one. I might end up writing a post about that one in particular soon-ish, too.

The two Macs I’m unsure about are a IIci, thus a representative of the classic 680x0-based systems but having a dead power supply unit, and a Power Macintosh 4400/200, which basically works but isn’t as portable as the PowerBook nor as capable as my other PowerPC Macs. I’d like to get the IIci fixed and upgraded, because of it having one of the aforementioned 680x0 CPUs (a 25 MHz 68030, I believe), but the 4400 is pretty much just dead weight.

So, in conclusion… I guess anything that doesn’t have a real world use anymore, whichever that might be, nor has some sort of either historical or monetary value, can and will go.

Memories are important. But objects related to them, in most cases, not so much. If the object in question is related to something life-changing, something positively life-changing, then yes, keep it, cherish it. If it’s something mundane, something that might trigger memories that you could otherwise still recall by just thinking of a person or place… then it’s probably not much of a loss in the long term. It might sting when you throw it out, but it’ll get better.

…

Oh boy, I’m getting philosophical, aren’t I? I guess that’s what a personality already inclined to such musings, the dead of night, and a blank text editor window do to you. I’ll write about something less heavy, more lighthearted next time. I hope.