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Give me a 8-pin Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter or cable for less than 20$ and we’ll talk.
My bag of cables in the attic that’s been there for the last 25 years says hello
fuck this one hits the hardest out of all of them. I refer to myself as an old man all the time, but this is shit I did in high school.
Didn’t know I was a dad. 😢 Come visit your old man.
Wanna hook up a thing to another thing? I got a drawer for that.
Lies. All he has is 4 different VGA cables, USB-A to USB-B, and the proprietary data cable for a pocket camera he gave you 14 years ago “because he doesn’t use it any more.”
You forgot to mention the rca cables. So many rca cables.
And loads of RF cables
You forgot the outdated ethernet cables. Cat4 or worse only.
I ended up stealing a lot of the USB-B cables for arduinos.
If for your dad it was a random offcut of wood you’re in the picture.
Never in my entire life have I ever used FireWire.
It was noticeably faster for external hard drives than USB 2.0 back in the day (though if anything I miss eSATA).
There’s still some Windows XP-era A/V equipment still in use at work that is Firewire.
It was my main port for close to a decade.
I still have a Firewire 800 drive connected through a Thunderbolt 2 adapter in use right now.
These situations actually happen to me from time to time.
Same but it only needed to happen once to make me feel I’d validated my entire collection.
So many plastic storage bins… in my office closet. Stacked. One for network cables. One for power cables. One for video cables… these are the large bins. please, send help.
Story time:
I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when a relative, who was cleaning some junk out of the house, offered me a white 1st gen iPod Touch. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn’t completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise. It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable.
The weather outside was what the Irish (with their particular brand of humor) might describe as “a soft fine day”, and what I would refer to as “a relentless bone-chilling mist”. We had no plans that day, so I located the nearest tech shop.
I arrived at this tiny shop in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I describe to the guy inside what I’m looking for. He presumably owns and runs the wee place alone, but he has no fucking clue. I couldn’t really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB-C standard at that point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous “lightning” cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, a thick, wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack by around 2010.
The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on a small box containing “cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A” in trademark Apple white. Come to Papa. It was the very last one, surely at this particular shop, maybe in the entire region. After making sure it was actually still in the box, I forked over 8 euros for the thing while expressing immense surprise and gratitude to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item. I went back home with my quarry.
I plugged in the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule – chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.
My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I “spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech”, but for me it’s a fond memory, and I’m serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy.
All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what might be the only tech shop in Connemara. He even looked like the guy in the meme! He must have figured that someday, someone like me might need it!
I still have a cable with one of those very connectors in use today. Some will recall that a lot of stereos and clocks had those connectors built in to dock and charge your ipods on. I bought a 2007 Eclipse that didn’t support Bluetooth and I wanted to add it. I then bought a Bluetooth receiver designed to plug into those ipod connectors and a cable I could attach to the backend of my car stereo that had the same. I still have that car today and that wiring and Bluetooth receiver is still tucked away behind my dashboard, working as well as it did almost 20 years ago when installed.
If it brought you joy, especially repeated joy, none of your investment was wasted. Thanks for sharing that with us.
One thing I learned after using computers for 34 years: As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it. I cannot see how that could be true for VGA and old centronics printer cables, but I shall not risk to find out.
Just this past year I had to buy a usb-c to vga adapter/cable for a trade show setup. Shit’s still in use today.
It’s still pretty common to see vga cables in use here in Brazil, and I believe that in many parts of the world as well. These old printer cables, they’re useful for arduino uno boards
Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.
Lots of stuff abused the DB25 and the DB-whatever it was parallel port
Sure. But it is not like own the shit to plug my modern hardware to VGA.
I think I have a USB to D-SUB adapter somewhere. Just in case:)
hence my drawer of converters having Whole partition just for vga converters. I’ve needed all of them at least once.
You, next week, browsing eBay: an 8K dpl projector, in box, with mounting kit, $15, no bids, ending in 8 minutes?!
You, a few seconds later: WHY IS IT ONLY VGA WHAT THE FU-
As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it.
This goes double for any cable that will be hard to get a new one of, so hold on to those centronics cables!
my boss has the biggest, ugliest old printer. it’s half the size of one of those big office printers, only it’s supposed to be a “goes in the corner of your desk” printers. has a feed for dot matrix paper and everything.
it has never broken once.
it has never had any network problems.
when he retired and the firm closed, and we all had a free for all looting the company, if we were the type of people to come to blows over things we would have come to blows over that printer. we settled it over a game of “i’m your boss, i get to take my printer home. go steal a box of pens and one of the other printers”
the monstrosity uses LPT cables. I don’t know how it connects to anything anymore, but every once in a while my old boss sends me a letter on dot matrix paper and that gives me a chuckle.
The moral of the story is: don’t throw away your unusual old cables.
List them for sale on ebay.
As with any other thing that is kept ‘just in case’, the size and effort to store in an organized way will be the reason for keeping or discarding something. I also keep at least one of each connector that I still have could possibly use either by something I own to tech that isn’t too old for me to aquire due to needing something a week after throwing it out and having to buy an overpriced replacement.
Yes, this means I do have some ribbon connectors because I have older mobos and drives with those and VGA connectors since some of my monitors still have those as options.
My limit is one plastic tub though, with the older stuff on the bottom like sedimentary layers. When it gets full I pull it out and ditch the oldest stuff I no longer need and stack it back in. The next round will probably prompt me to ditch the older ribbon connectors and drives that use them.
I lost my BT earbuds 2 months ago, have a Type C phone, and just chucked out my ~5 Type C earbuds, because I had never used them since I got the Bluetooth one. I only left a pair of Jack earbuds. Guess where my Type C to Jack adapter went…
Na, at that point through the device away.
This perfectly captures the universal “box of random cables” every parent somehow kept for decades.
My Mom always throws out old cables like a week before I head over there and need that specific cable.
And this is how I learn that I have a secret sibling
Since you’re here - we really need to find a way to spike Dad’s YouTube algorithm. I saw his feed and it was all Fox News and OANN stuff.
delete the history and then watch a bunch of my little pony stuff on his account. like, a lot a lot.
I’m not even a parent, and I got a crate of cables too.
Am parent, can confirm. But i started about 20 years before becoming a parent. To go ahead of the curve.
I dig into my (organized) box of cables 2-3x a year. I still have functional older equipment that still sees occasional use.
Pro tip: go through the box and get rid of the duplicates of older items. No need to have 3 IDE ribbon cables, 4 SATA to 4-pin power adapters, or two parallel port cables.
I did this, and then my then-gf desperately searched for a cable one day…
my box used to be organized. now it’s all just a jumbled mess and i’m scared to open it
+1 I only keep multiples of commonly used cables and I use ziplock bags to keep cables of the same type together in my cable box so it’s easy to tell if I’ve accumulated too many.
Nice. This guys hoards expert level.
I recently pulled a DVI to VGA RadioShack branded cable to connect a camera system to an old monitor. The dopamine of victory is worth it fellow cable hoarders.
I’ve been working in AV for the past five years. The amount of times I’ve needed DVI and VGA is astounding.
That might just bring me to orgasm.
What in the pfp is that?
