I feel like you about zip drives, had many of them die a premature death. I still have an external parallel one, complete with cable and a few disks. Haven't tried using it in over 12 years, but last I remember it still worked. I would never dream about storing anything of any value on those disks though after we had a few catastrophes at work in the early 2000s.

I used to have an external firewire zip drive which was useful... for testing firewire installations. It was the only firewire device I had back then.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

How about the serial 9-to-25-pin adapters?

Good one! Or even the stand-alone ribbon cable. This completely slipped my mind. The only item I have which uses a 25-pin serial connector is my old Ti graphing calculator, but there is a 25-pin-to-9-pin adapter for this, making the need for a 25-pin serial port useless.

I finally found a piece of hardware that can use a male-A-to-male-A USB cable: an extremely crappy-looking cooling pad that probably can't effectively cool anything.

Otherwise, I would not have expected to ever find something that could ever use such a fundamentally useless cable, despite the fact that the cables themselves are readily available for some strange reason. Its useless cousins, the male-A-to-female-B USB cable and the female-A-female-A adapter, also turn up.

Modems can used to connect two Systems together with a little circuit.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Direct-connec … d-modems-or-te/

You just have to ignore Dialtone and the modems will connect well.
So you can use them as cheapo network cards (eg. Laptops with build in Modem without LAN... for example).

MPEG1 cards immediately comes to mind. Playing Video CD's on a Pentium 133Mhz is probably not a priority for anyone.

I was also going to say dedicated 8 bit joystick cards and 9 to 25 pin serial adapters, but I forgot about IBM PC, XT and clone enthusiasts.

\

I've got a keystick. The URL is in spanish, but clicking on the photos will enlarge them and you'll see the item: some kind of add-on that is put above cursor keys to fake a joystick. That item is mostly useless now, either because the keyboard has not enough space surrounding the cursor keys to place it or because the keys are too low to be pressed.

Looking to the pictures, it's hard not to mention those "cages" that came with some mouses and were meant to be glued to computer case. The keystick had one 😉

Also, I've got a USB to USB cable. It was used to transfer files between two computers, but I'm afraid that it's not supported in later Windows.

matze79 wrote:

Modems can used to connect two Systems together with a little circuit.

Why not using a null modem cable? Simpler, cheaper and faster than using two modems. A better use for that circuit would be using that circuit to connect a fax and a modem to get a cheap, low resolution, black and white scanner (or printer). Some years ago two coworkers use a similar circuit to test faxes, rendering two faxes into a copier.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

How about the serial 9-to-25-pin adapters?

I used some of them with financial printers (i.e.: Olivetti MB2, Wincor 4915, etc), to make a printer work with a serial cable for another model. I know that it would be better to replace the cable, but sometimes that mean to wait another day.

Zup wrote:

Why not using a null modem cable? Simpler, cheaper and faster than using two modems.

Because some systems have a modem, but not a serial or parallel port (and one of the systems may not be a PC but a console, e.g. Dreamcast)

focusing more on the undesirable side then useless.
-Small capacity HDD's, I still like the OS installed on a HDD rather then CF cards, It just sound wrong otherwise, but I wouldn't really bother with using anything smaller then whatever that PC maxes out (6GB and 8GB for my earliest PC's) accept I already have the smaller drives.

-CD Drives, Again I use them as I have them but if I actually had to buy one I'd get DVD instead.

-Floppy Drive, 50/50 on this, if I actually need to use a floppy for anything then a 1 off file copy I'll swap it for a gotek. but still has a certain nostalgia element to it.

There is one thing about old TV card and that is getting a good signal from old consoles and or home computers such as C64. They use non-standard signalling and most of the modern solutions fail miserably. A lot of old cards use the Brooktree Bt878 (later Conexant Bt878) chipset which can cope well with non standard video signals. It is worthwhile to save those cards as they are still supported today by e.g. DScaler even in Win10 64 bit.
So if you have such a card (some even with S-Video In) and consider dumping them, I still have a use for them.
Sometimes this chipset is on cards in addition to SAT, like on the Pinnacle PCTV-SAT.

Agree on TV cards... but from my experience they introduce a bit of lag.

PCI modems, hands-down. I have like 30 of them.

Zup wrote:

Also, I've got a USB to USB cable. It was used to transfer files between two computers, but I'm afraid that it's not supported in later Windows.

Yes, there are "USB bridge" cables that have a bunch of extra circuitry in the middle. (I'm not sure what driver support is like for those.) But there are also cables with no such circuity that may very well damage the USB port if you try to use them.

I threw away a bag of softmodems (PCI winmodems, CNR and AMR) last time I cleaned my hardware stash. I'd say old printers, especially inkjets, are pretty much going to be just a dust collector in any hardware collection.

CNR/AMR modems at least have curiosity value.

I've kept one piece of CNR, AMR and DAA, and a couple Winmodems (with Agère chipset) for the sake of collection 😀

kixs wrote:

Agree on TV cards... but from my experience they introduce a bit of lag.

Depends on the card, of course. I used to have a Radeon All-In-Wonder card (first gen I think), and I used that for quite a bit of retro console gaming in 2002-2004 through my PC.

Jorpho wrote:

male-A-to-male-A USB cable [...] I would not have expected to ever find something that could ever use such a fundamentally useless cable, despite the fact that the cables themselves are readily available for some strange reason. Its useless cousins, the male-A-to-female-B USB cable and the female-A-female-A adapter, also turn up.

Unfortunately this abomination of a cable is quite common where I live because pretty much all of the cheap (as in 'the only ones you can buy') 2.5" & 3.5" IDE/SATA to USB hard drive enclosures have the male-A socket on them instead of something sensible like the B or mini-B. At first I replaced the connectors on the enclosures I bought but it got tiring very quickly and I finally caved in and used the damned things as-is. And they did it again with USB 3.0 for god's sake! 😳

My Dell OptiPlex GX150 came with one of these in the AGP slot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGP_Inline_Memory_Module

I quickly replaced it with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. Nowadays, I'd say AIMM modules are more of a curiosity than something useful.

Errius wrote:

CNR/AMR modems at least have curiosity value.

Now those were truly useless even pci modems were at least a fail safe option and didn't need a dedicated slot.