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What is the most useless vintage computing item?

G

generic486

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And by useless I mean functioning but it doesn't serve any purpose.
I'd have to say modems. I see some really sweet looking modems around but I don't buy them because they are not compatible with my plan. It probably would of been working fine 5 years ago before I upgraded from dial up to broadband cat6. The practicallity has taken it's toll on modems.
 
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My father used a modem until very recently (some months ago). Dial-up Internet is still offered by the major telecom in Norway. It's called "Freesurf" and is nearly free.. the only reason my father had to get ADSL was that his netbank kept adding more and more useless stuff to their pages and login mechanism, so at last it simply took too long to log in (time to have several mugs of coffee). But it worked fine for lots of other things, it's just that the netbank is essential and forced the upgrade.

The modem is still connected and sits there as a backup solution for when ADSL fails (as I expect it to do occasionally).

So what's the most useless vintage gear? Hm.. that could be many things, but for me that would be old harddisks simply because there's no capacity and they wear out with use. I finally stopped using my 1989-1991 harddisks when the computer they were connected to (through the only ancient SCSI card that I have for them, which only works in ISA slots which I don't have anymore) broke down. At that point the 1989 drive had already failed, but the 1990 and 1991 drives were still chugging along. But, just like an old car that get's used all the time, they wear out, and you can't really fix them the way old cars can be fixed.

-Tor
 
Although rarely used by most people anymore, at least modems are common and interchangeable. The most useless item is an interface card for a rare peripherial which you don't have and have no hope of getting, like a proprietary scanner, graphing tablet, bus mouse, etc. And likewise, interface cards and peripherals for which you don't have the driver software, and for which the software isn't available anywhere online, are totally useless:

 
vwestlife said:
Although rarely used by most people anymore, at least modems are common and interchangeable. The most useless item is an interface card for a rare peripherial which you don't have and have no hope of getting, like a proprietary scanner, graphing tablet, bus mouse, etc. And likewise, interface cards and peripherals for which you don't have the driver software, and for which the software isn't available anywhere online, are totally useless:
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THIS
Oh my god, this. I actually have one particular PS/2 piece of equipment with this too. It's the IrisVision video card. All the development and DOS software and drivers exist but somehow the OS/2 software and drivers have vanished from existance.
Anyways, yeah, I have piles of hardware with the same problem where it's a really cool piece of gear but on the software side all existance of drivers or anything have simply vanished with time or because the manufacturer never made it public.

Off the top of my head, one of he most useless things you could get were those floppy drive locks.
[imghttp://www.secure-it.com/images/products/Disklocks/dlk-400a.jpg[/img]
 
Last year AOL reported 3.5 million dialup users. Of course there are millions more who don't sign up to AOL. Sorry, I can't help but sarcastically adding that this is typical of the things one can look up on the net - even with a dialup account. :)

I think "uselessness" would be relative to the user. There are lots of people who wouldn't know what to do with punched tape, yet it is still used in industry. Magnetic tape is still going strong after 60 years and IBM just came out with a new format. How many people here think it is useless?

I would have to agree with vwestlife when he says "The most useless item is an interface card for a rare peripherial which you don't have and have no hope of getting".
 
Finding the rare peripherial is still possible, even if it means winding up with 2 interface cards for a single device after locating a complete setup.

Much less useful are prototype removable storage drives that never made it into production. Even if one filters out all the non-working trade show demo pieces and finds a working drive and working media, there is still a fair chance that changes to the design would ensure that the specific revision of the media will not work with the specific revision of the drive.
 
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krebizfan said:
Much less useful are prototype removable storage drives that never made it into production. Even if one filters out all the non-working trade show demo pieces and finds a working drive and working media, there is still a fair chance that changes to the design would ensure that the specific revision of the media will not work with the specific revision of the drive.
Click to expand...

Along those same lines, I have a motherboard with what is supposedly a beta version of USB ports onboard. They don't work because the final USB 1.0 specification changed too much by the time it was finalized. Of course, the rest of the board still works, just not the USB ports.
 
MikeS said:
Tell that to the many thousands of people like myself who still use them every day.
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Ditto, so personally to me anyway they're not useless. I do however have a few "broadband modems" that are currently useless to me at the moment ;).

Have a full length ISA card from a 486 that was used in a Hospital and have absolutely no idea what it was used for.
 
Not from the 70s/80s (cuecat barcode scanner). Hm, maybe I was thinking of another thread. Coulda sworn this one said that in the unedited first post. I wanna see the director's cut of this thread.
 
PC tape drives. I have a bunch of them with tapes, and have no clue if I should get rid of them or keep them for the off chance I find some tapes with useful data on them. Next to that may be the iomega zip drives, but I think I may have found a use for them. Someone (on Youtube I think) has used theirs with their Amstrad PPC for larger storage as opposed to finding a hard drive.
 
Yeah the scsi zip drives show up without any drivers on systems that accept external scsi drives. I used it with my Amiga and it was great to quickly transfer larger files back and forth.
 
Ole Juul said:
Last year AOL reported 3.5 million dialup users.
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AOL still exists? :)

I'd have to agree on the long-lost peripheral controller card. They just take up an ISA slot, but I keep them in there just because it was there when I got the computer. That and the annoying pileup of ISA modems. I also see no use in the "Scroll Lock" key.
 
If I can't find the drivers or software for obscure hardware, then I do whathever I can to get hold of technical reference material. But, yeah, obscure hardware with no drivers can't really be used for anything.
 
Bungo Pony said:
PC tape drives. I have a bunch of them with tapes, and have no clue if I should get rid of them or keep them for the off chance I find some tapes with useful data on them. Next to that may be the iomega zip drives, but I think I may have found a use for them. Someone (on Youtube I think) has used theirs with their Amstrad PPC for larger storage as opposed to finding a hard drive.
Click to expand...

I've got tapes and tape drives that go back 25 years in some cases. Amazingly, they're all readable. But for an early Irwin DC-1000 drive, I stayed away from "floppy tape" drives. A good decision. I have DC-600, 6150, 6250, 8mm, DDS, DLT and they're all fine.
 
Bungo Pony said:
Next to that may be the iomega zip drives,
Click to expand...
I actually find them pretty useful, especially since I've got the parallel port/scsi combo, a USB one, and an IDE one. It's real handy for shuffling files around.
patscc
 
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