Real geeks never chuck anything away

TWENTY YEAR OLD POWER SUPPLIES. You just can't have enough of them, can you? You simply can't tell when you might need one. The same goes for VESA graphics cards, antique ISA SoundBlasters, serial mice and knackered 14 inch CRTs. Don't even mention cables. Show me someone who's been around IT for a few years and they'll have boxes full of the things. After a decade or so, the spare room simply isn't big enough and the junk spills out into the garage.

What is it with geeks and throwing stuff away? Why do they never do it? You know in your heart of hearts that you'll never use that 1200bps modem, but you just can't bring yourself to bin it, can you?

Last week, I moved house. The spare room at the old place was stacked to the ceiling with boxes of cables, dead monitors, ropey printers, 5.25-inch floppy drives and hundreds of CDs including such useful items as the first beta of Windows 95 and a copy of CorelDraw so old it had originally been licensed to Michelangelo. I'd been in the house for around five years, but this wasn't stuff I'd accumulated in that time, oh no. Some of this junk had followed me around since the 1970s in no fewer than ten houses. I even found a reel of paper tape. Paper tape, for God's sake. What was I ever going to need that for again?

My friends are all the same. I don't know a single person who's into IT who hasn't got a huge collection of crap that they know they're never going to use, but keep anyway.

So a life-changing decision was reached. Four trips to the local dump later and I had been purged of my IT legacy. It was a cathartic moment. Of course, my friends think I'm crazy. Surely I realise I'm going to need something I've chucked out within days. Never mind that it's been sitting in a box for 15 years - as soon as I dump it, I'm going to find out what I needed it for and I'm going to have to go onto eBay and buy another one.

Now I'm down to one box of cables, nearly all of which fit something I still have. I only have three spare ATX power supplies and one spare monitor. I obviously still have the six disc, single speed CD changer - that has sentimental value, as does the box of 486 CPUs. That's four hundred and eighty six CPUs, by the way, not a couple of 25MHz Intel 486 processors. µ