My Digital Graveyard

With Halloween here, I figured I would rummage around the basement a bit and dig up some long dead gadgets. They are all headed for the trash bag so this is their last bit of stardom. I’d hand them out to trick or treaters but fear the retaliation on the house. 😉

First up are the drives. A three and a half inch floppy drive and two CDROM drives. You can tell the oldest one by its beige color. The RO in CDROM stands for Read Only and these drives kept to that specification. No burning, writing or copying to these CD readers. Strictly read only at a blazing speed of 12x.

The pager and Kodak camera were easy candidates for the graveyard. Kodak doesn’t even produce or develop the film anymore. Good luck finding a beeper plan. 😉

I’ve never even actually used a BNC connector. If not for the 10MB Ethernet connection to its right, this Intel NetExpress printer thing would have been Dead On Arrival when I stumbled upon it way back when.

The Philips remote was a fully programmable mono-color TV remote control. I never really got used to the screen based keys. I couldn’t quite give up the tactile feel of the remotes I had already. It’s actually quite funny since I’m typing this blog post out on my iPhone right now. I prolly should have given the Philips more of a chance before dismissing it.

Last but not least is the Panasonic CF-01 handheld computer. That puppy ran Windows 95 with a touch interface (via stylus of course) and was pretty kick ass. It was a little smaller than the iPad and I had it throughout the 90s. Sometime during that period, I turned it into a live web server and picture frame. I kept that sucker running for a loong time before retiring it.

I’m sure everyone reading this has their own digital graveyard sitting in the basement as well. I say dig ’em up and hand ’em out or toss ’em away. 🙂
Either way, Happy Halloween.