The yuck that is "PC Recycle Day" at Microsoft

Hey all, Ned here again. Still no ETA on Win8 word, and we've already discussed everything else on Earth ( ;-P ) so now I will share with you some insider knowledge of working in Microsoft Charlotte: the quarterly "PC Recycle Day". Here's an example of what I just saw on my way to get some coffee.

A couple of these are fairly hard to identify unless you are as old as Jonathan. Take a stab at them in the Comments, if you dare to date yourself. If you've used them all, give yourself a pat on the back - you are really close to retirement.

Update: Woo, a particularly crusty late arrival from the Networking team! They may upset the perennial Setup team favorites here and win it all this year, folks.

 

Update 2: a funeral pyre for once-dominant protocols

 

Have a nice weekend,

 

- Ned "spring chicken" Pyle

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2012
  I actually have used ALL of them... scary.

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2012
  Woah thanks for some scary flasbacks!  Sadly I'm nowhere near retirement though...  So I have to ask, are these gems from personal collections (technology hoarding) or stuff people still had under their desk at work?

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2012
  There is never any explanation. They appear as if by magic, and no one wants to claim them.

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2012
  I WISH I didn't know what all those things are! You should have a contest to see who can find the crustiest recyable item! We routinely get some of the most insane things dropped off in our office... skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx Hope that link works...a small sample

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2012
  I could be wrong, but I think that blue thing is a book.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2012
  Dude, I'm still working with DLT (not even SuperDLT)... that's really scary

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2012
  Craig, I think you are ready for upper management. :-D Nice work, Squeezer99. And yes, of course that sound card was ISA. We won't see PCI cards for years, I'm sure.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2012
  The Jaz drive could hold approx. 1GB on a "Jaz Disk".  Great at the time over floppies and Zip disks, but not very portable.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2012
  They were also insanely unreliable. It was like having a casino black jack table store all your data... eventually, the house always won.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2012
  Oh .. love that Courier! Remember, once we upgraded those machines to support 56K ... they were blazing fast! Hmm, and Jaz ... that was expensive thing. Wanted to have it instead of all the 3.5 floppies ... cool post anyway.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  I had an external 100MB Zip Drive long, long ago. It connected to an LPT port and had a brick-sized power adapter if I remember correctly.  A few months ago while doing some house cleaning, I stumbled across one of the my old zip disks, but the drive was long gone. I wandered around the office trying to find something that could read this stupid disk so I could see what I used to think was important enough to occupy space on my precious 100MB zip disk 15 years ago, but alas I could not find any zip drives, and eventually, I discarded the disk. I'm sure there are now some Counter Strike screenshots that are lost forever...

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  Since no one else pointed them out yet, looks like some Dell Optiplex GX280's (or 260? little blurry) in the background of the modem picture.  Granted they are much "newer" in the grand scheme of everything else...  other than maybe that "book" thing Graig pointed out.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  Wow... apparently they still sell brand new disks, but apparently no drives from their site.  I wonder if that's just what they happened to still have on their shelves.  :) go.iomega.com/.../disks-accessories-for-zip

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  Here you go Ryan: iomega.com/data-recovery :-P

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  Whoa, I didn't think people actually used Jazz drives.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2012
  Gotta love the growth rate of technology!  We talk about things like they were from the 1950's or 20's, that were around sometimes less than 20-30 years ago.  I found myself saying "back in the day" a few weeks ago about something too.  Although at the same time, Back the Future II was on the other day, and I had to laugh at the "future" vision from 1989.  Good stuff.

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2012
  Everything old is new again, Steve. www.mattycollector.com/.../productID.247060500

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2012
  "authentic 'whooshing' sounds"  ...nice   :D

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2012
  Wow, just imagine the fumes if you actually did set that ablaze! Can we have a moment of silence for all the protocols that are no longer with us?

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2012
  Bow your heads for Banyan Vines VIP...

• Anonymous
  March 16, 2012
  Banyan Vines.  Pure Unix and could run Oracle before any other PC hardware system was able to do it. How about Telebit Trailblazer modems en.wikipedia.org/.../Telebit