A while back there was this humorous piece on a dude's personal webpage about quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects as he described how his CD collection kept losing items that turned up in unexpected places. I went looking for it to link it, but in a funny twist, documented quantum tunnelling of objects bigger than atoms, "visible size" even, has been a hot thing in physics for the last 5 years and those pages drown out the one I'm looking for.

Anyway, this came to mind again, as today, I found a floppy drive right where it wasn't yesterday. Yesterday I thought I had a floppy drive sitting on a particular shelf, I needed a floppy drive, I checked that shelf, no floppy drive. Today, go back to said shelf for something else and there's the damn floppy that wasn't there yesterday, extremely strange.

I just turned up one of these (not my pic) serial version...

I completely forgot I had one, so that was a bit of a surprise. Too lazy to take the pic of mine yet, it's too grubby, needs a bit of spit and shine. Also in the vicinity was another Microsoft serial mouse and an unopened AOL 7 CD 🤣

Wifey and I were rearranging the master bedroom and these horrible things popped out from the darkest corner of the closet. Gave me a hell of a shock....😉

Harrrrr! Yiss! I found one of those mythical "safe places" the one I put away some socket A CPUs in, tucked up a corner in a small box, on a shelf I've looked at a dozen times, they was hiding. There's a TbredB 2000+, an appalbred 1600, a morgan 1300, and a spitfire 900... now I suppose there's no excuse not to mess with that NF2 board again and turn it into a P4 slayer, provided the tbred has some legs.

M571 Found!

It knows nothing of any Voodoos though. It was hiding under a box of plumbing parts I needed to get out to fix the kitchen sink. So I think I know why I couldn't remember what I was doing with it last, because it didn't really get done. It's just screwed into the case there with nothing installed.

Funny thing though, I was just getting around to thinking that I must have given the M571 away, and ze secret skunkverks projekt was getting rebrained another way, possibly using an M748 instead, and now I don't know if I prefer the M748 version after all, or will return to scheming with the M571... I'm prolly gonna end up running them head to head on the bench to see which ist der ubermachninen fur das sondergerat zehr geheimnis.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-01, 01:22:

M571 Found!

It knows nothing of any Voodoos though. It was hiding under a box of plumbing parts I needed to get out to fix the kitchen sink. So I think I know why I couldn't remember what I was doing with it last, because it didn't really get done. It's just screwed into the case there with nothing installed.

Funny thing though, I was just getting around to thinking that I must have given the M571 away, and ze secret skunkverks projekt was getting rebrained another way, possibly using an M748 instead, and now I don't know if I prefer the M748 version after all, or will return to scheming with the M571... I'm prolly gonna end up running them head to head on the bench to see which ist der ubermachninen fur das sondergerat zehr geheimnis.

Don't forget to replace all the caps and fit a new power supply, for you know, just in case...😉

I mounted another expedition, somewhere I thought I had not checked for the Voodoos, and I guess I hadn't as I found a box of motherboards.

From top left.

1. Busted SQ595 430FX .. Think I was tryna run a K6-200 or so on it, reg getting super hot, bolted on a big HS, still ended up blowing it and it kinda cracked off, threw it in the box to deal with later I guess.
2. MS-5156 TX4 430 TX, it was on one of my lists, don't remember running it, don't remember fighting it, possible ignored because I had better boards to run K6-2 on.
3. Two Aopen boards, MX36LE via s370, coppermine/tualatin ... These were "working" when I put them down for a nap, caps gone spoogy, unstable, so theoretically good as new with a recap. No APG though, Triden blade onboard, I was thinking of getting one of these going when I bought 6200 PCI cards tho.
4. Zida 5DXP socket 7 430FX, again don't remember running or fighting it.
5. two sad P2Bs, came in a junk lot, already had regulators removed, don't know if I took anything else, might donate parts to better P2Bs I've got elsewhere.
6. The crown jewel, la piece de resistance, the PCChips M741LMRT ... yah kidding, SiS 370/slot1, missing it's BIOS chip and a bit warped... I maybe plucked it to try reviving something nicer, so will give it a whirl sometime.

And yah, no voodoos still

MS-5156 only has some higher voltages screened on the board, so I may not have realised before it went down to 2.1V which I just found out. Also has three pin bus speed with only 60, 66 and 75 documented, so interested to see if it's got any low or high undoc settings. So might be having a play with it soon to see what it can really do.

nice

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-15, 18:57:

A while back there was this humorous piece on a dude's personal webpage about quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects as he described how his CD collection kept losing items that turned up in unexpected places. I went looking for it to link it, but in a funny twist, documented quantum tunnelling of objects bigger than atoms, "visible size" even, has been a hot thing in physics for the last 5 years and those pages drown out the one I'm looking for.

Anyway, this came to mind again, as today, I found a floppy drive right where it wasn't yesterday. Yesterday I thought I had a floppy drive sitting on a particular shelf, I needed a floppy drive, I checked that shelf, no floppy drive. Today, go back to said shelf for something else and there's the damn floppy that wasn't there yesterday, extremely strange.

BTW I misplaced my ISA floppy controller from 486 pc in signature , unable to locate it anywhere. ( I know I had it). same with my pci Machy64 Ati.... I think its in one-some PC,(somewhere) last I used it during PCIe gpu Flashing period a-decade ago....
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"Horun" I sold my Abit Siluro TI4600 sadly,(way way long ago b4 the '09 crisis). and the person I sold it to I only sold-it with the verbal agreement to get it back when he did not need it anymore , sadly he stopped talking to me after a while , after they dissolved YM..... on YM.... and he never even sayed hello on street when we bumped into each other. (I'm a bit sad about that card.... lucklly I still have some nontested/nonworking Quadro's with same GPU).
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I did loose some GPU's from my collection (misplaced) but eventually I found the box. so it's ok now, gained more edition's since then (mostly broken stuff) I may have a close to 16 year old photo of the collection , and I post them here .

more

L.E. Btw I lost 2 AT sk7 or 5 machines (mini-towers) unable to locate them anywhere . (remember this one going to repair shop with it because some minor issue)One was a AMD 100mhz cpu with S3 VLB card , 50 pin SCSI card + 2 or 4 gb drive.. damit.
Second was a 100% sk7 with IBM cpu 233mhz + a hdd ide and some sdr memory or close, from my dad's old office , I don't know where' is it. (I have the screen DIY stand-ed Broken back-light IBM LCD in garage but no PC , I got this pc from same repair shop-now defunct). I think they both had kb hooked to it. ...
... so Yeah stuff get lost , and brain itch as you say. (they are so misplaced I have no clue where to start searching).

L.E.2 , Now come to think of it , I may have exchanged one of them to a dude as a upgrade exchange.... for a Asus Crosshair AM2 board + amd cpu + ram... new-er stuff-generation.... no w8 , I got the AT PC as part of the exchange , I upgraded the system to him,or not , now I am confused... oh well . it's lost to the past-master. from Swatcats.

Most of the things turning up "by surprise" I notice, are in boxes that I thought something else completely was in. Or, incompletely labelled boxes, like 3/4 full of what I thought it had, and surprise, bonus extras.

I wish I had thought to take photos years ago though, even with the crappy cameras I had back then, it would certainly help to picture exactly the cards in question and what they were associated with. I have only been taking pics for my own reference for about 5 years and even now it's real handy when you think "Did that board have 2 or 3 memory slots" etc, one can look them up if you are super sure of model, but sometimes you get different revisions with different things populated, and are then like "Damn, I thought this board had 6 full length ISA" and they had populated one of them with only an 8 bit on yours.

After long experience, I've got the family/friends divided about 60:40 into those people who I can lend something to and they give it back, or build them a computer from spares for free and ask for it back when they have no use for it.... and the other group who you only let them get their hands on things you never want to see again, because I've lost 2 desktops, a laptop, a router, 3 monitors, that way over the years. One of them made the "no way in hell" special list, put them together a low spec internet and office machine because they said they were desperate, and by low spec, I mean low end of spec that was still in retail, so could have sold it for $300 at the time, anyway can't blame forgetting over time, because a literal month after I did this she gets a celeron machine off one of those predatory finance companies for a sticker of like $900 worth of debt (climbing at 20% APR or worse) which was the spec you could probably pick up for about 5 or 600, and it was basically only 20% faster than the one I built. So ask her to return the other one and she's like "It was complete and utter garbage, so I had to throw it out." *sigh* The best bit is, this was cap plague times, and the new thing was crashing inside 3 months, and I was all "Oh that's too bad" then she stopped paying on it and they repoed it, but she had barely made enough payments to make a dent in interest, so ended up snowballing and owing 2000 on it by the time she went for a credit settlement deal. Anyhow a bare month or so after that one is gone she's like "Can you build me a computer?" so I'm all "Haha, no!" ... well I guess there wasn't any super special hardware lost there, okay i815 board, but I'd probably still be using the case.

BitW. That's sad. Sad how thing's work there in Canada. (I'm in eastern' Europe ).
I use to sell tech before the great crash of 09. (than dismantle and sell laptop parts up to '12) then only occasional stuff-till I sold everything sellable and occasional builds or software or fixes(*mostly this last , I maintain 3 offices , sometimes only one , and I'm so good at my so called temp-job , I'm like jack b. asked to fix entire infrastructure in 24h or under in a Crisis situation - than jet me hang for years or mo.).

I do remember lending stuff and never recovering, even have list somewhere. (except for the Abit Ti4600 I really miss), from the top of my head - *tech stuff never recovered - I gave a PS1 console with 2x PS2 joysticks , A gpu 7300GT or 7600GT or both , a 2600XT when it was new , a X600 or close to that gpu that never got recovered, PCI FX5200 graphics card, some ram-sticks and laptop hard drives. Laptop parts , and a few other stuff I forgot and 2 switch'es recently. My grandpa's old sport-B&W 12Volt tv was scraped from country home.... and others. (I keep having a dream that I lost a dacia car.... my gradpa had one that was scraped).

I lost even a Video Akai VCR , have no clue where it went < I know I had it one time , and was stored in garage.

All this is like when I lost my business account at the local bank after the real-estate company I was headfigure defaulted (account was still valid after '09 fiasco , up to '15 or so)
Then I was completely deleted from bank records , even from joint account so I decided to never ever bank again. than when plandemic hit they close down my paypal account (Sayed-for inactivity) so my last hope for a digital monetary system went away with that.
@"so I'm at war with the mattresses!" - *You got mail 1998

It turned out dad knew about one of the missing AT systems , and he told me it's in the office , of corse it's not. he mistook the P4 PCchipsm950 with the AT minitower.... maybe it will turn-up one day.

Funny, I lost a "Dacia" in a way from the family also. It was what the Dacias were based on, a Renault 12. We had it as the family car for several years. When my parents got another car an Estate/Break/Wagon type, because of needing to transport things, I got given the Renault 12 to fix up for when I passed my driving test, as I was coming up to the age where I could get a driving license. I spent a summer fixing up the bodywork nicely. But then it was found that some rubber parts in the rear suspension, bushings, had rotted and cracked. Nowhere could they be found in the whole of the UK Renault dealerships, or even in France, discontinued. The way they were designed it is likely that they would have continued to work for years, but the safety regulations for vehicle inspections said no rot in suspension rubber parts, it would not pass one of the government safety checks that were required, also known as an "MOT" (This was in UK) ... anyway, the poor Renault 12 just sat and got rusty again... and had to be scrapped... about 1 year before the trade opened up with Romania and I might have been able to buy the Dacia part to fix it.

I built a relative a pc out of a Lenovo Thinkcenter AM2 board, brand new 200gb IDE 133 Seagate, 1gb HD4650, 2gb of ddr2 and a Athlon 64x2 that had about 60 pins crushed and stuck to the stock heatsink that I spent hoooours straightening. Blew $30 on a Athlon 64 6000+ to replace it and a new 450watt Antec PSU. With the stipulation I got it back since I didn't charge anything. Ya, she used it for 6 months and dumped it at Goodwill when she didn't need a PC anymore. . .

Not hardware, but retro computing related: My Wing Commander II game from 1991 or so. Decade or so ago my parents brought me a box old games that I had left there after I moved away. Pretty much all the games I remembered were in the box, few were even in CIB condition, but WCII was missing. Odd thing is that speech pack and special operations 1 addon were there. I never remember having loaned the game to anyone, it was just missing.

Back in the day I pretty much stored all the games on the same shelf and at some point my folks refurbished my room and packed them away. That game should’ve been there, but apparently it wasn’t and I have no clue at what point it got separated from all the other games.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-16, 15:00:

Funny, I lost a "Dacia" in a way from the family also. It was what the Dacias were based on, a Renault 12. We had it as the family car for several years. When my parents got another car an Estate/Break/Wagon type, because of needing to transport things, I got given the Renault 12 to fix up for when I passed my driving test, as I was coming up to the age where I could get a driving license. I spent a summer fixing up the bodywork nicely. But then it was found that some rubber parts in the rear suspension, bushings, had rotted and cracked. Nowhere could they be found in the whole of the UK Renault dealerships, or even in France, discontinued. The way they were designed it is likely that they would have continued to work for years, but the safety regulations for vehicle inspections said no rot in suspension rubber parts, it would not pass one of the government safety checks that were required, also known as an "MOT" (This was in UK) ... anyway, the poor Renault 12 just sat and got rusty again... and had to be scrapped... about 1 year before the trade opened up with Romania and I might have been able to buy the Dacia part to fix it.

That is sad. They still have dacia's in the retro-car-club and dacia parts. My uncle (who's no more,rip) , scraped my grandpa's Dacia (R12) for clunkers(cc'07) program to buy a new Fiat. I will post photo(taken,for insurance, after my dad's big crash of family car ) of the dacia I lost. (to time).
MOT is a ..... , I still have problems each year with my car's , they rev'ed max the engine on w123 vintage car (wich is a nono for a pre 1985 car). Once they blew part of gasket on my truck when I buy'ed it 13 years ago-or-so (I sold it last year,-to the past- was a great NissanD21 from 89)