Every time I go through my boxes I find something "I missed" or is it just my memory messing with me 🤣

Just the other day it was "Yamaha DB50XG"... and I was like... wow, I have this card... nice 😲

PS:
Don't know how many times I said to do an inventory of my stuff... I guess I just don't find the time nor the space to do it... maybe sometime this summer when I move all my stuff to new storage 😊

A few candidates here:
1) I lugged some old hardware around through a few moves (one across the country), and really, it was luck of the draw what I ended up keeping vs throwing out back in the day. So a couple of years ago when I got interested in retro computing, I dug through the boxes I'd been dragging round to my last few houses, and found a few decent video cards -- Voodoo3 2000 PCI, Radeon 9800Pro, GF3 Ti200, GF 6800GS AGP.
2) A couple of years ago (right after I got back into retro PCs), I flew back across the country to visit my mom, in the house I grew up in, and was asked to help clean out my old room. I came across a Genoa 8500VL, which now resides in my 486 PC.
3) Same trip, going through stuff in mom's garage, I found a large bag with a complete-in-box NES and about a dozen game cartridges. I'd bought it in the early 90s when I was in college, but hardly used it (I was an avid PC gamer then). I used it so little that I completely forgot that I ever owned it until coming across it again. Now it's set up in our gaming room...never used. 🤣

Oh do I have a story.

I had an old IBM PS/1 with a 486SX-25 (me thinks). It could be considered my first retro computer. I had brought it home from a neighbor who didn't want it anymore, and started it up with Windows 95 installed on it. I had a load of fun, including putting MS-DOS 6.22 back on it with Windows 3.11, but the fateful day of going full retard happened.

Keep in mind I was around 9-10ish at the time. I was messing with the machine with the top off while it was still running, and being the dumbass I was I shorted out a few headers on the board that made the screen go all funny. I guess I shorted something that obviously was not supposed to be shorted. As a result the magic smoke exited the unit, and I was left with a giant brick. The unit ended up at the side of the road, the CRT was dumped at a tech recycling event, and the keyboard was busted by the genius known as me. The only thing I still have is the mouse, which needs it's connector to be soldered back on from an attempt to convert it to RS-232 that ended up in me just buying a serial mouse.

Fun times.

In terms of stuff just laying around that I found out was really awesome, I think one example would be my father's HP-48G calculator that I have on permanent loan. It was before I was due to go to community college for some small maths classes that I was looking for a good calculator (I think it may have actually been a bit earlier than that). I was swooning over the 68k calculators from Ti, which I have to admit, still have some small amount of my interest. I picked up the 48G with the goal of learning how it worked, and with barely any use of a manual, I had figured out the ins and outs of that calculator. It had set me on the right track to HP calculator heaven. I soon learned that the Ti calculators that I had been so interested in were absolute pieces of garbage compared to HP's offerings. Today I have an HP Prime and 50G, things I wouldn't have had without that calculator.

kixs wrote:

Every time I go through my boxes I find something "I missed" or is it just my memory messing with me :lol: […]
Show full quote

Every time I go through my boxes I find something "I missed" or is it just my memory messing with me 🤣

Just the other day it was "Yamaha DB50XG"... and I was like... wow, I have this card... nice 😲

PS:
Don't know how many times I said to do an inventory of my stuff... I guess I just don't find the time nor the space to do it... maybe sometime this summer when I move all my stuff to new storage 😊

I get this basically every single time I (for whatever reason) start going through my stuff.
Btw, inventorying your stuff should be fun! 😁
I've only done a partial inventorying, never got around to finish the rest. I'm especially curious about my games collection, I never ended up doing a count 😲

Took me a while to appreciate a VLB Cirrus Logic GD5428 I got. I imagine it happens tons if your stuff is bought in lots.

Did a big clear out just before getting back into retro computing. I dumped over 10 full systems I had at my parents I'd picked up one way or another over the years ranging from P3 down.
Few years ago went thought what I still had. Found a SB32 (not AWE) and a VLB IO controller I never knew I had.

Most other things I always knew I had though 😉

Ampera wrote:

Oh do I have a story. […]
Show full quote

Oh do I have a story.

I had an old IBM PS/1 with a 486SX-25 (me thinks). It could be considered my first retro computer. I had brought it home from a neighbor who didn't want it anymore, and started it up with Windows 95 installed on it. I had a load of fun, including putting MS-DOS 6.22 back on it with Windows 3.11, but the fateful day of going full retard happened.

Keep in mind I was around 9-10ish at the time. I was messing with the machine with the top off while it was still running, and being the dumbass I was I shorted out a few headers on the board that made the screen go all funny. I guess I shorted something that obviously was not supposed to be shorted. As a result the magic smoke exited the unit, and I was left with a giant brick. The unit ended up at the side of the road, the CRT was dumped at a tech recycling event, and the keyboard was busted by the genius known as me. The only thing I still have is the mouse, which needs it's connector to be soldered back on from an attempt to convert it to RS-232 that ended up in me just buying a serial mouse.

Fun times.

I did the same thing with my HP Vectra. Fortunately it's still working fine.

I remember that 2-3 years ago I found a mysterious Yamaha PCI sound Card. At this time I knew Yamaha was doing high-end things in the sound domain, but I didn't knew they did sound cards. I picked it up by curiosity but I forgot about it for 9 month maybe. 9 month later, when I wanted to replace windows ME by windows 98SE on my pentium 3 computer, I encountered a big problem with the internal sound card of that computer which was a sound blaster of some sort. I could'nt find the right drivers. I'm pretty sure that if I really wanted to find them I could've find them, but I was pissed off. Then I remembered about that mysterious sound card and I decided to give it a shot.

What was my surprise when I discovered how good it was ^^ And that's before discovering all of it's features such as the awesome compatibility with DOS games it has ! I was really blow away by the capabilities of that sound card such as the XG synth, etc

I was going through extra stuff the other day and a found a PCI-e S3 chrome video card, to new for me, but very rare if I recall.
I recall having it in a system with a MultiChrome setup.

Yup, totally happened to me.
About five or six years ago I was recycling computers in school. There was few nice systems I was after, especially one IBM PS/2 model 30 (which sadly got recycled by someones ignorance - i was SUPER mad on her...). I came home with three systems - old dual Pentium something server (as matter of facts, I do not know what that is, maybe I am having another gem), Compaq desktop with P3 I believe and third - purple Fic Leo, ugly as heck. I was trying them, on the Leo there was Windows XP installed and the GPU had one artifact. Later that day filtration capacitor in the PSU blew up with loud bang so I tossed it to the corner and left it there. Later I stashed more computers on it and completely forgot about it.
I was searching for Super Socket 7 board for few years with no luck. I gave up because prices on local auction page were too high and I brought home way too many computers to fit my storage room, so something had to go. I started disassembling those computers I didn't want because their cases were mangled/pieces missing and sorting them in boxes to save some space (almost everything what went to dumpster was broken PC cases from Pentium 4 era with few P3 OEM cases like Dell Optiplex). Then I came around the Fic Leo computer. I opened it and immediately said "Wait, why is the CPU in the right bottom corner?". You guessed right - sometime in it's life somebody guessed that Cyrix MII was capable to run XP, installed it, noticed that it barely can so they threw it to storage where it waited for me.
The only thing that buggs me now is that I left second one behind. I could have taken it, but I didn't know what was inside and I thought one is enough. Stupid me...