What is the weirdest item you have in your box of spare parts?
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Different parts of scribing compass. Back from elementary school :cool:
[My Blog]
"Visual studio desperately needs some performance improvements. It is sometimes almost as slow as eclipse." - Rüdiger Klaehn
"Real men use mspaint for writing code and notepad for designing graphics." - Anna-Jayne MetcalfeI have an old cartography compass and related set, must be circa 1900.
Cranial Apocalypse
Calling all South African developers! Your participation in this local dev community will be mutually beneficial, to you and us.
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Marc Clifton wrote:
My neighbor's lightning striked modem.
WOW.
[My Blog]
"Visual studio desperately needs some performance improvements. It is sometimes almost as slow as eclipse." - Rüdiger Klaehn
"Real men use mspaint for writing code and notepad for designing graphics." - Anna-Jayne Metcalfe -
In the bottom of my filing cabinet I still have an 8 inch floppy from old PDP11 days.
Peter "Until the invention of the computer, the machine gun was the device that enabled humans to make the most mistakes in the smallest amount of time."
I have few boxes of 8" floppies. I have one machine spared from salvage because it has a Colorado tape drive to go with some very old source archives, but I really don't know the life of mag media. The tapes are probably unreadable. I have an Apple ][+ in the original box, with cassette tapes of programs I typed in from Nibble Magazine. Heck, I still have the Nibble magazines too. I have Microsoft "Typing Tutor" from 1976, I think it was. Maybe 1978.
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I have an old cartography compass and related set, must be circa 1900.
Cranial Apocalypse
Calling all South African developers! Your participation in this local dev community will be mutually beneficial, to you and us.
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I have a slide rule that I used when taking Physics "back in the day" and the TI-SR 50a calculator that replaced it, in it's original zipper case. Also, a Radio Shack VOM meter that I assembled from a kit in 1974, I think. Still works!
I had a slide rule once, in school. It was in preparation for the next year's maths classes, as electronic calculators were not yet permitted in schools. I never used it, as they decided to allow calculators the year I would have needed the slide rule.
Cranial Apocalypse
Calling all South African developers! Your participation in this local dev community will be mutually beneficial, to you and us.
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I still have some 5.25" floppies lying around... they are not weird, just a little old :)
Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix Chihuahua, Mexico
Still got any single-sided 5.25" floppies? I've got (in original box, with KMart $10-48 price tag!) the chomper so you can turn them over and use the other side.:-D Peter
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I had a slide rule once, in school. It was in preparation for the next year's maths classes, as electronic calculators were not yet permitted in schools. I never used it, as they decided to allow calculators the year I would have needed the slide rule.
Cranial Apocalypse
Calling all South African developers! Your participation in this local dev community will be mutually beneficial, to you and us.
Cool. Keep it and pass it down to your grandkids. Mine is actually one my father bought in the 1950's, I think, and he passed down to me so I could use in school. I'll pass it down as well as more of a "techno-heirloom". Using it reminds us that the greatest bridges and buildings were built only to 3 significant digits. Who needs 64 or 128 bit precision? .
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I have a small box of screws, the ones that hold the expansion cards in. The box only has 6 screws in it and a 4" model of Nicole Kidman, painted in a suggestive way. I also have a small plastic container holding 4 of my teeth and the complete toe nail from my right big toe that came off whole as the nail bed had a severe fungal infection. Not sure why I keep them, but once you've had something like that for so long you are reluctant to let it go.
Last modified: 1min after originally posted -- typo
"More functions should disregard input values and just return 12. It would make life easier." - comment posted on WTF "This time yesterday, I still had 24 hours to meet the deadline I've just missed today."
Malcolm Smart wrote:
I also have a small plastic container holding 4 of my teeth and the complete toe nail from my right big toe that came off whole as the nail bed had a severe fungal infection.
:omg::wtf:
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
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Cool. Keep it and pass it down to your grandkids. Mine is actually one my father bought in the 1950's, I think, and he passed down to me so I could use in school. I'll pass it down as well as more of a "techno-heirloom". Using it reminds us that the greatest bridges and buildings were built only to 3 significant digits. Who needs 64 or 128 bit precision? .
I did not have a calculator (they were still quite expensive), so I borrowed my father's slide rule and learned to use it. I remember taking it to school, and unintentionally endearing myself to one of my teachers who was "from the old school" and quite fond of slide rules.:)
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
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I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAA Smarty (tm) Smart Card floppy disk adapter. I don't think I even have a floppy drive any longer.
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
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I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CA -
I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAA ZX Spectrum Tape Drive, a 3" diskette, an epson printer ribbon circa 1987 and the Lotus 123 manual from 1990, ( in case we have to use that old software again after the bomb goes up!).
------------------------------------ Happy Primes Lead to Happy Memories. Don't Google FGI
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I have a slide rule that I used when taking Physics "back in the day" and the TI-SR 50a calculator that replaced it, in it's original zipper case. Also, a Radio Shack VOM meter that I assembled from a kit in 1974, I think. Still works!
I sat and showed my son how to use a slide rule! He though a cuckoo would fly out of my forehead, he couldn't understand the concept and wondered why you wouldn't do the calculation by a calculator, or computer. Oh child of little faith. Batteries Run Out, but a slide rule lasts forever! (had a teacher at school who used to joke about having a bucket of water read in which to cool our slide rules!):)
------------------------------------ Happy Primes Lead to Happy Memories. Don't Google FGI
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I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAWhy only limit this to spare-parts-boxes? ;) My "collection" currently consists of: Parts of a 100-year-old clock Sand from Creta A pack of blood plasma, expired October 1973. 10 ml Novalgin, 10 ml Adrenalin, expired October 1972 (both are empty) Glass syringe that came with the drugs, complete with 3 screw-on-needles A catapult for "small chocolate-covered cream cakes" (Schokokuss in German) Empty Coke-Bottle, ca. 1970s My first Steiff-Teddy (1978, parts 1980,1982,1984,1986,etc.) 300m barrier-tape ("Fire Department - Stay Back" and "Danger of Radiation Exposure") Several Give-Away-Lighters, some ruptured, some molten 200ml H(S04) 99% 200ml HCl 99% 5 liters of distilled water 1m tank track (should be somewhere) .. and other interesting items ..
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I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAHow could that work? Because VGA output in analogue, while USB is numeric. Does it have a build-in converter?
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I still have one out in the garage also (at least I think it is still there ;) ).. Along with my old ZIP drives.
Rocky <>< Blog Post: LINQ Scores a Yahtzee! Tech Blog Post: Cheap Biofuels and Synthetics coming soon?
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Malcolm Smart wrote:
I also have a small plastic container holding 4 of my teeth and the complete toe nail from my right big toe that came off whole as the nail bed had a severe fungal infection.
:omg::wtf:
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
Tom Delany wrote:
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
Oh God. Anybody got a towel? I just spewed coffee all over two monitors. :laugh:
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAIf you apply the rule that the item from the box of spare parts has to be something actually useful, my weirdest item would be my TRS-80 Model 100. It's useful for debugging small embedded processor projects that use RS-232. Program it in BASIC, speeds up to 19.2K; pretty :cool: for its day.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Yep that looks familiar. One of the first Architecture firms I worked in had a Lanier word processing machine. It used two 8" floppy drives; one for the OS, one for the data. The thing sounded like a small aircraft on boot up, but we did all our specification writing on that sucker. I have in my garage/tech museum an Alloy Tape backup drive w/ four 40Mb (wow !):laugh: tapes, the floppy bidirectional interface card, cables, and software on 5 1/4" floppy with manual. I believe it would still work. Along with other assorted detritus of technology of old, I have the first computer I bought from a friend. It is a USIT 386 SX 16Mhz small form machine. It had a whopping 40Mb harddrive and I added one of those Kingston memory boards to boost the RAM. I did freelance design work on this computer for several years using AutoCAD 12 for DOS, then upgraded to 12 for Windows and Window 3.1 (whooo Hoo) :cool:. It still have the harddrive and I bet it would still boot up. I try it every once in a while just for laughs; or when REALLY bored. Pheadjack My Purpose is to encourage others to question.... everything
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I recently came across a VGA to USB adapter. Not quite sure what it's for, but it may be useful someday i guess. I used to also have an internal tape drive circa '91 that used a "clip" type floppy cable. I had a few other things, but i don't remember anymore, though nearly everything i wouldn't intentionally buy is salvage stuff. Roswell :)
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAI have some old FORTRAN algorithms for making line printer plots. They are on some punch cards in my junk box. Anyone have a card reader handy? I also have a couple rolls of punch tape. One never know when a real TTY machine will show up ... As far as hardware, there were some memory chips from my old TRS80 Mod 1 and a single-sided 5-1/4 floppy drive with a TI99-4A interface in a box in storage. Wonder if I could run Vista on that?
The PetroNerd
