What do you regret throwing away?

Deborah Pickett

I’ve hardly got any retro tech in my house. It seldom lasts through the Valley of Uselessness and gets tossed out in hard rubbish.

I remember our Commodore 128 growing up. No idea what happened to it.

I remember my first synth, a Casio MT-70. It eventually failed and got thrown out.

I remember my first mixer-recorder, a TASCAM 644, which recorded onto standard cassette tapes, four tracks wide. Tossed it into hard rubbish because tape is a terrible recording medium, but the mixer was OK.

I wonder what I’m going to throw next that I wish I’d kept?

Mike, Slightly Yellowed

I had an Amiga 2000, plus the 1081 monitor, keyboard, mouse - the whole deal. I got handed the system from someone who was just done with it, for free. I have dumped or given away a lot of other things that I regret, sure, but this one is special because like your Commodore 128 I have absolutely no idea at all where it went.

I remember one house where it was in one particular room. After that it's just not in my head anymore.

No idea. It's just gone!

geo

I haven't really thrown anything out, my retro collection is relatively small in comparison to others that I see online, I just don't have that much space and I probably have too much right now anyway.

I did sell my C64C setup (sans monitor) to an online mate of mine (mutual followers on Twitter back when that was used, remember that network?) as he wanted to get back into 8 bit retrocomputing, I wasn't looking to make money off him so I sold it to him at cost. The C64C never really resonated with me as my formative computing experiences were 99% with the Amiga.

Having said that, I have accumulated some other retro computers that I probably need to part ways with. I have a couple of eMates (one is a part machine) that has been sitting around for years doing nothing. The good one works pretty well but needs a battery repack. I did initially invest in an eMate to experiment with distraction-free writing but since becoming a dad this is a very lofty ambition. A Slack channel I'm on had someone who was pining for an eMate, so I should probably hit him up and offer these two eMates for sale to him.

I also have a PowerBook 1400c with a replacement screen to go into (and all the cardboard graphic inserts that go into the lid) but again, MacOS 8 wasn't really my jam when I was younger and so I have no emotional or nostalgic attachment to it. I should probably let that one go too.

My dad also found an IBM PS/2 386SX that was being tossed out, along with the famed Model M keyboard, so I pinched that off him if only for the keyboard, but there's this rest of the PS/2 (it was just the main computer + keyboard, no screen) that I don't know what to do with. My nephew is getting into retro computing at only 11 years old, I might hand it over to him and see what he does with it. The PS/2 still has its hard drive (along with the software that was used at a hospital! thankfully no personal records) but I feel it might be a bit underpowered for my nephew, his idea of retro computing is either 8 bit or 486/Pentium era gaming.

So TLDR, I don't have an extensive collection, but am wary of getting rid of the stuff I do have, lest I do regret it later on.

Mike, Slightly Yellowed

geo I never had any PS/2 stuff, aside from using it in some work contexts once or twice. I always kind of wanted to go down the OS/2 path on one of them back in the day, it seemed so much more "serious" to me, hahah!

You reminded me that I used to have two Model Ms though, and I gave one away to a family friend with an old PC I fixed up for them and their kids ages ago. They would have had no idea what they had there. It would have gone to the bin ages ago now.

geo

Mike, Slightly Yellowed hey I forgot all about OS/2, maybe I should install that for giggles just to see how it goes on actual hardware. It might have to be OS/2 1.3 or 2.0 though.

Shame the keyboards were thrown away, those things are monoliths and nigh on indestructible.

geo

I took another look at the PS/2 today and realised it's a Model 30 286, so it's not a 386! :S I highly doubt my nephew would be interested, this thing's too old for him I think.

Mike, Slightly Yellowed

geo Indiana Jones voice It belongs in a museum!

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2585/IBM-PS-2-Model-30-286/

Sounds like a gem of a thing to mess around with!

Lacey

My first MegaDrive... though didn't throw it away, but sold it to get a PlayStation. Have mulitple MegaDrives these days but still missing some of the games I had, and I can't remember exactly what I had either!

Lacey

Lacey Actually, Having just seen the "Indiana Jones Voice" I did have boxed copries of a lot of Lucasfilm/Lucsarts games... and though I didn't throw them away, they went missing somewhere along the line.

Mike, Slightly Yellowed

Lacey I feel like my biggest actual regrets aren't items I've thrown away, bit the ones that just vanished and I have no idea how, where, or when.

I know exactly what happened to my original Commodore 64. I broke it, I sold it for parts. While I'm sad about that, I'm ok because I know the full story.

A couple of DEC Alpha motherboards however - they should still be around here, somewhere ... right? I never would have tossed them, but somehow they just no longer exist.

Lacey

Mike, Slightly Yellowed Gives a whole new meaning to bit rot doesn't it?

sb

I had a good quality Sony walkman I wish I'd kept when it broke. And now with the resurgence of retro gaming I wish I still had our family's Nintendo 64 with all the games that now sell for hundreds of dollars.

But now I have the opposite problem. Because of my couple of regrets I now can't bring myself to get rid of anything. Partly because I don't want batteries to go to landfill and partly because I don't know what the next nostalgia-fuelled craze might make valuable and/or worth returning to.

I'm 99% certain nothing I've kept is worth keeping but probably would have said the same of the C=64 our family only held onto out of a tenacious reverence for the hours we sunk into Wizball.

Mike, Slightly Yellowed

sb I sold my N64 right at the beginning of the retro resurgence curve for bit much at all because I thought it was better someone who'd use it would have it.

It's one of the smaller regrets, at the time I figured I could pick one up again later if I felt like coming back to it, and it'd cost less by then. Hahaha no

fraggLe!

It wasn't me that threw it away, but the one that hurts the most is my SGI Indigo2. It weighed too much so I couldn't get it in a suitcase coming back from the USA, while keeping adequate packing around it, so I left it with my sister in law and I figured when I had the money I'd pay to ship it.

There was some confusion, I told her she could throw away my green BMX in the hard rubbish, and she heard "green computer", so it went out with the city hard rubbish week. 😭