I was in the middle of working on the PC XT clone when SpinRite turned into an all-night job, so I grabbed a different project for the day. I had paid $20 for a box of computer parts at a local e-waste facility before anyone had really gone through it, and I wanted to see what was actually inside. One thing near the top had already made the box look worthwhile, but there turned out to be quite a bit more than that.
Right near the top was a Yamaha AC adapter and a matching pair of Yamaha YST-M10 powered monitor speakers. Those alone made the box look pretty decent, especially since the power supply was included. I also pulled out a tight Atari joystick, a small Systec calculator in a leather case, and a GE answering system with its fold-out instructions and manual still with it.
A Palm III turned up next, complete with its dock, serial connection, manuals, and a protective case. That was followed by a Sony Clie, also in a case and still with its stylus. A lot of the smaller items had clearly been kept together over the years, which is always nice to see when you’re sorting through older handhelds and accessories.
There was also a big stack of Creative and Sound Blaster material in the box. I found manuals for the Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster Pro, text-to-speech, SCSI, and software, along with original installation disks. The best item in the whole lot was the boxed Sound Blaster AWE64, and the card was still inside with its paperwork and cable. It was a 16-bit ISA Creative card, model SB4380, and the original box still had a $199 price sticker on it.
Mixed in with that were a few other nice finds: sealed Sony MiniDiscs, sealed TEAC high-density tape cassettes, a bootleg Windows 98 disc, and a Creative webcam with its software and microphone. I also found a Turbo Pascal handbook with disk, an MSDN Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition development disc, and a handful of floppy disks that included drivers, utilities, and a copy of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. There were also Microsoft Project for Windows floppy sets and some Adaptec and Colorado backup disks.
A lot of the rest of the box looked like it came from someone who spent time building or adapting hardware. There were homemade-looking cables, serial adapters, test boards, and one unidentified serial adapter box with switches that I couldn’t place. I also found a Pro Action Replay unit, a Linksys PCMCIA Ethernet card with its dongle, and a couple of wireless laptop cards. Those old PCMCIA network cards still come in handy when you need to move files onto an older laptop.
Toward the bottom were some larger parts, including a 3.5-inch floppy drive, a TEAC FD-55GFR 5.25-inch floppy drive, and a Seagate ST5660A hard drive dated 8/11/95. The Seagate had a separate controller or adapter board in the box that matched up with it. There was also a rough QuickShot joystick that had gone floppy, plus a few more calculators and assorted cables.
The box ended up being well worth the $20. The Yamaha speakers and boxed AWE64 would have been enough on their own, and everything else just added to the pile.
— Aaron
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