And the only times I have ever been forced to throw stuff out I have needed it within the next couple of months.


I'm taking the opposite approach. I'm clearing out accumulated "stuff" from my basement, making room for the addition of another person and two more cats to the household. Some of the stuff I am getting rid of has been tucked away out of sight and out of mind for more than 20 years now.

I have already hauled about eight station wagon loads to the landfill, and I figure the job is less thanb half done. My rule of thumb on whether to keep or get rid of something is ",,,do I have a known, specific need for this item in the next 30 days." If not, out it goes!

To that end, I have a LOT of computer stuff that is going away. The impressive part is: it's about $60,000 worth of stuff. The catch is, when it cost $60.000, that was back in the early 1980s. It's probably depreciated in value a liile bit by today... might only be worth $30,000 now.

(Yeah. Right. )

It's a bunch of Altos equipment:

1@ Altos 986 w/5.25" floppy drive
2@ Altos 586 w/5.25" floppy drive
2@ dumb terminals
3@ tape drive backup units + a bunch of tapes
1@ 80 MB external hard drive
1@ Texas Instruments TI-810 dot matrix printer
Xenix operating system with manuals
Informix database system with manuals

This equipment is from a business I was part owner of, and when we sold the business for some reason the new owners didn't want our computer equipment. I mean, who wouldn't want a computer with a 16 MHz 8086 processor running a whole megabyte (I think...) of RAM.

Anybody who wants this stuff can have it for the cost of the shipping. Otherwise it will go to the recycling center where some idiot will pick it up and take it home and store it in his basement for the next 15 or 20 years...

tanstaafl.