Yeah I can’t wait for when enthusiasts want my stacks of 2004 laptop RAM sticks and LCD panels.
The demand will open up any second now
I still have a small box of old ram and a bunch of cpus from that era.( 20 to 30 yrs ago) Had them for years in case someone I knew needed them. I need to take them to a recycling center some day but there isn’t one close by.
My Mom had a saying when I was young(er): vintage is all the crap we couldn’t wait to get rid of and couldn’t throw away fast enough.
Decades later, I totally get what she was saying: 30 year old PCs are utter crap in my eyes. Good riddance. Who wants to restore that junk: it was cheap-ass commodity hardware at that point. A PDP11 on the other hand… 🙂
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure I guess. I can’t count the number of PCs I brought to the recycler simply because I literally would have had to pay someone to take them back in the days. I wish I had kept them to sell to today’s enthusiasts and get back some of the insane money that stuff sold for when it was new.
There are instances, especially on the federal level, of a Windows XP machine that’s roughly that old running HVAC systems without a connection outward. It requires a connection that isn’t on modern PCs and the support software out of date.
There’s a commodore
64amiga running HVAC in iirc a high school.
The less something is available, the more it is worth.
Take VHS recorders for example. Something that used to be extremely common is now super rare because it doesn’t get manufactured anymore, but tons of people still have plenty of VHS they want to see so they still get used. After a while those break down too, making the pool even smaller.
The less something is available, the more it is worth.
Capitalist propaganda. Rare garbage is still garbage. The desire has to be there and often isn’t. But capitalist ideas say you have to hoard for potential.
That seems the exact opposite of capitalism? I would assume capitalist propaganda encourages you to throw away old things and buy new. Preserving old things is antithetical to that
There can still be value in some old things like maintaining old equipment or preserving old media. The demand may have collapsed, but it didn’t collapse to zero.
but tons of people still have plenty of VHS they want to see so they still get used
They still have usable data on them? They were magnetic and one weak point was cross-magnetisation on the reel, causing ghost images. (What was that defect called again?) And the magnetisation holds 30 years otherwise?
Depends on storage conditions and age but I just digitized my family VHS tapes from 96 to 08 and they were all still in great shape having been stored inside and left alone. Older tapes might be having trouble around now
I remember some old Disnay VHS about 15 20 years ago, wasn’t fun with all the ghosting and crosstalking.
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It is called “recycling”.
The step before “recycle” is “reuse”
People reusing 30yo computer is legendary, as in the rarity.
Industry use. Pretty common.
I don’t think most industries are buying used consumer electronics.
No, what i meant is, industry has pretty often a old DOS, NT or XP running on original hardware.
I know, but the problem OP has is with people recycling consumer electronics that never would have been used for industrial purposes.
What those “enthusiasts” do with the old machinery isn’t reusing. It is hoarding.
Would you say someone restoring an old car should recycle it instead? If an archaeologist finds an old buried tool should they recycle it? The rosetta stone is made from valuable silica, let’s recycle that too!
People are allowed to enjoy things. If having a couple of old computers makes someone happy, isn’t that better than them buying new things instead?
Even if you collect garbage, it is still stupid to whine that garbage is recycled.
It’s not hoarding as long as it doesn’t impair your ability to lead a normal life in a livable home. Beyond that, to each their hobbies.
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…now
You have to be very patient and have an awful lot of storage space - and bet that the junk you’re storing will be worth something some day - to even bother keeping crappy stuff in any large quantity to turn a profit in the future when the stuff is still crappy and not worth a damn now.
The reason 386s are getting rare is because nobody in their right mind made that bet when they were still around and completely deprecated.
The only person I met who made a similar bet and won big money was a Brit who bought 6 Jaguar E-Types sight-unseen when they came out, and put them in storage for 30 years (prepared professionally for long-term storage too). When those cars came on the market, brand new with zero miles on the clock, they sold for millions, the guy bought a nice house in Hampshire and retired in comfort.
He told me he just knew that model would be a highly desirable classic the minute he saw a picture, and almost bankrupted his family to buy them as an investment. Ballsy.
Have you looked at price of gold lately?
Yeah, and one would get more gold by panning sand from a river somewhere in West Papua.
Destroying several tons of ewaste to get at almost nothing.
Go look up what happens to wannabe prospectors operating without license, at least in the USoA
Heck even the videos of gold/gem/geode prospectors I’ve watched make odd offhand comments about sicking police on tresspassers
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You’re presuming that all that ewaste is actually still usable - but in many cases the parts are discarded not because they’re old but because they’re broken.
Are you suggesting that we hold onto old, broken crap just because you can’t bear to see recycling in progress?
I mean the futility of mining for gold in ewaste. The scrappers have gone through older processors, and now they’re getting the later processors from some 10-15 years ago that have much less gold.
So, again, what should happen with ewaste? should we just chuck it in landfill?
it might have less gold, but recycling is recycling, you got to use as much of the raw material that went in as you can, precisely to reduce the waste itself.
as for CPUs from 10-15 years ago… see if it was some proprietary system from the 70s-90s that’s impossible to emulate and only a handful units remain, I’d understand your outrage. But we’re talking about CPUs from the height of the computer boom, the true internet era, when even the least common model is available in the number of millions TODAY… That’s no longer a retro system you’re restoring, you’re literally upset about low performance, high power use hardware that has better alternative today, being recycled. Which has to be the stupidest thing I’ve read today…
Like, quite literally, architectures and hardware design changed so little since 2010-2015. Aside from RISC-V making a comeback, it’s pretty much been linear predicted improvements on all fronts. Gone are the days of experimenting with architectural changes, experimental platforms that are super unique, and so on. Literally any game or software you can think of when it comes to a 10-15 year old device can run on today’s devices because we kinda plateaued around 2016-2018 at most, and compatibility hasn’t really shifted in any major way. Apple went for ARM instead of x86, but Rosetta is still there, so even ancient Mac apps work. Literally anything you could do on hardware from 10-15 years ago, you can do on modern hardware the exact same way, but more performant and using less resources.
So what kind of “retro preservation” are you doing exactly?
What’s the alternative? Throw it in a landfill? Keep it carefully organized in a massive clean-room warehouse with hundreds of thousands of shelves?
Yeah but then they’d have to travel there which reduces profit margin.
Most of these devices have plenty to go around.
