When you mentioned “Ethernet cable”, I assumed you meant some form of early Ethernet coax like 10base5 or 10base2. The infrastructure cabling for 10baseT is really just twisted-pair telephone wire. In any case, it’s remarkable to be living in an age where any sort of Ethernet cabling is referred to as “the detritus of abandoned technology”! I speak as someone who, as a kid, had the opportunity to visit Xerox PARC just at the time that Ethernet (along with the innovation of a windows-based PC) were being developed there. 10 Mbps was considered an awesome speed. Today my internet connection is almost 100 times faster.
A very good friend of mine used to work at one the the very early Ethernet-over-twisted-pair companies, David Systems.
There is also a chimney attached to a fireplace, and the roof is very steep. It took me awhile to notice both of them at the same time.
I have a palimpsest of recording technologies, from a turn-the-handle gramophone and piles of 78s, through vinyl LPs, VHS tapes, CDs and DVDs to PVR and computer hard drives.
My family will thank me when I’m gone 
I’ve got an unopened box of floppy disks on my desk right now that I use as a paperweight.
Floppy as in 3.5, 5.25, or 8"? 
There’s old school and then there’s serious old school! 
About 18+ years ago, I had some pretty major work done on the house, and while the sparky was here, I got him to run CAT-12 to outlets in every bedroom, the lounge room and even the garage. I mean, everyone knew back then that wireless data transmission would never be able to manage large amounts of data, and we were a modern family.
I’ve eventually got around to putting blank covers over all the outlets.
Cat-12?
This talk of Ethernet coax reminds me of one of my old CS departments. They started with “fat” Ethernet and eventually moved to “thin” Ethernet. After that the CS department moved into a new building.
I bet those old cables are still in the building running down walls and thru the hanging ceilings.
Yeah. He means two runs of Cat-6. Talk about future-proofing!
I just remembered pitching a box of Zip drives and Zip disks. And a box of I forget the name backup tape cartridges and a matching drive. You could back up, oh 50MB, in a bit less than 2 hours. Woot!!
The tech was late 90s and they got jettisoned around 2014 so a decade ago. And were useless trash for a decade before that.
At first I thought you said “zip ties”, and thought “No way, those are always handy!”.
But, yeah, um, Zip disks. We had those in the astronomy department when I was an undergrad, in the late 90s, and already they were pretty well on their way to obsolescence. In fact, the only reason we used them at all was that the department head insisted on keeping a bunch of the research computers off of the Internet for… I’m sure he had some reason or other… so those were the only way to efficiently move data on and off of those computers. IIRC, the data chain went:
1: Research telescope, hooked up to an Apple ][e.
2: Computer running OS 2/warp, connected to the Apple and driving it somehow through a parallel port.
3: Isolated intranet, to the computers two rooms down, where we ran our data analysis programs (written in a mix of C and some flavor of BASIC).
4: Zip disks
5: A different computer, also with a Zip drive, but finally with access to the Internet.
As of when I got there, we also had racks sitting out in the hallway of data on old punched paper tape that nobody could read. Every so often, a student would take a stab at cobbling together something to read them, but then graduate before they finished. Just before I graduated, the reels got lost in a big building remodel… and it turned out that nobody missed them.
I once sold my dad’s ancient Apple 2,400 baud modem on eBay. The Keck Observatory bought it.
I asked them why they wanted such an archaic piece of hardware, and they said that they used one to talk to some piece of equipment, and didn’t want to worry about compatibility issues with a different modem, so they bought dad’s as a spare.
“Reels” of paper tape? I don’t doubt they existed, but back in the day when I worked with paper tapes, they were in a fanfold configuration, although that may have been just a DEC convention. Even the paper tape readers were made with the fanfold tape in mind, like in this picture.
IIRC correctly 10base2 Thin Ethernet was invented at DEC but DEC engineers, who tended to be perfectionists, weren’t too fond of it and there was a reluctance to productize it. They eventually were forced to by the insistence of one large European customer, and it became quite popular until 10baseT took over. It differed from traditional Ethernet in that instead of transceiver cables running to transceivers tapped into the backbone cable, the thin wire was daisy-chained from device to device using BNC T-connectors.
Around 1980 in junior high school, we had terminals connected to some sort of mainframe at the high school and the output was on paper tape, but not fanfold style. Instead it was just a long strip that I rolled up.
That was likely an ASR-33 teletype which was a common terminal device in those days. It had a paper tape reader and punch attached to the left side. The blank paper tape came on a roll that was inside the machine. If the punch was turned on, any characters sent to the teletype would also be punched. The device printed and punched at the awesome speed of 10 characters per second.
Thanks. My memory is far too vague to confirm that.
The phone line running to my house broke when a limb fell on it. I hadn’t had phone or DSL in many years. When I called to ask them to clean up the mess, they said they only did that for paying customers. When I said I would get out my big ladder and remove it from the pole, and then strip it all the way back to my house and within, they warned me I would have to pay to reinstall when I needed their service again. If I were drinking anything at the time I read that, it would’ve shot out my nose.
My house is much cleaner without that detritus hanging off it.
I don’t mind all of those wires and cables in the crawlspace or the attic but I don’t want any of their wires attached to the outside of my house or boxes on the side of it. All of that gets pitched as soon as it’s no longer used.
This paper tape was definitely on reels. And it’s been a while, but I don’t think it had holes side by side… Just one big hole, maybe half a centimeter on a side, spaced sporadically.
Probably some obscure format bought back in the day by the same professor who thought Zip disks were the wave of the future. And which explains why nobody was ever able to find a machine to read it.