For whatever reason, I frequently can't bring myself to throw away dead computers or peripherals, even those that are clearly well beyond help. I don't have a problem throwing away other things--about twice a year, I discover that I've ditched some important piece of paper or a computer file in my periodic purges of the masses of information clogging my workspaces.
But I still have, in the basement at home, the first laser printer I bought, an Hewlett-Packard 6MP, which I bought in the early 1990s and which has been non-operational since about 1998, as well as several very-low-capacity hard drives that are either completely frozen or have serious and unresolvable disk errors (and are such low capacity--in the megabyte range--that they're not worth even trying to restore). Maybe it's nostalgia for the things I worked on with them--my first published articles, my dissertation, email to friends, or angry memoranda to department chairs about faculty who treated the young grad student I was as a young grad student instead of, say, God. Or maybe it's just a psychological problem, since I apparently have no problem pitching the same things in the form computer files or printouts.
No hope for the 6MP yet, but Boing-Boing links to some ray of light for the hard drives to live on, at least in reincarnated form: a HOWTO on turning a hard drive into wind-chimes.
[via Boing Boing]
Posted by johndan at February 23, 2005 08:00 AM | TrackBackI have an old Western Digital 40 mb drive on my desk now serving as a book-holder-opener. Couldn't bear to throw it away.
Posted by: Bill H-D at February 23, 2005 12:14 PMCool. At some point during a move from house to house, I lost a La Cie 5 MB external SCSI drive. I think I paid nearly $400 for it in the late 1990s.
Posted by: Johndan at February 23, 2005 12:49 PM