Why am I holding on to THESE things??!?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In a box in my junk room I have 78 back issues of *A+ Incider * magazine, a magazine devoted to the Apple II computer. I found them at a yard sale years ago, bought them for a couple of bucks, and have had them ever since. I’ve had them maybe six years.

I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

They’re perfectly useless, except for a certain nostalgic feeling I get when I browse through them and remember the excitement I felt back in the Good Old Days when I got my first IIc and Apple ruled the PC universe. Other than that, they’re just taking up space in an already overflowing apartment.

But I can’t throw them out. Something horrible will happen if I throw them out. Lightening will strike me. I’ll get hit in the head by a meteor. Western civilization will collapse. Something.

I don’t even have a working Apple II any more. All I have is a IIGS emulator on my Mac. The actual machines I threw out without a tear.

Yet still the magazines stay.

Every time I tell my self firmly that I simply must throw them out because I have absolutely no use for them whatsoever, and neither does any other civilized human being, I can’t do it. I pick up the box, head for the door, and somehow or other the box ends back in my junk room where it was before–although once I did get almost halfway to the dumpster before turning back.

A thousand years from now, archaeologists will dig up my coffin and find a skeleton clutching the tattered remains of 78 magazines devoted to an obsolete, defunct computer. And I don’t understand why any better than they will.

Do you have anything like that? Is there some white elephant, some perfectly useless piece of junk taking up badly needed space in your life? Have you ever dragged your collection of old, tattered comic books or beat up old teddy bears almost to the dumpster in fear and trembling, only to turn back at the last moment with a tremendous relief?

Who else has a perfectly needless and cumbersome possession, some object you can’t give even the wildest half-baked rationalization for keeping, which you simply can’t bring yourself to toss out or give away?

2

I wouldn’t be all that surprised if they are now starting to attain value as collectors’ items - if you can contact the market. I bet there would be museums out there that would be interested in them too.

3

My class books.

I have over 20 books (mostly of the textbook nature) which I have purchased for various courses.

Most of them, I’ll probably never read again. Many of them are for classes in fields I’ll never take a class in again.

Does that mean I’ll get rid of them, throught, say, the buy-back program, like an ordinary person would?

Of course not!

As a result, my bookshelves become progressively more and more crowded by textbooks, and I have two more years of classes to go.

4

How about you pick say 5 and get rid of the rest?

Or take a picture of them and then discard.

You can’t rid yourself of them because they mean something to you–they probably represent the you that you were at the time you had the IIc.

You are still that person–really!

(I dont’ hold on to much anymore–having to serve as the holding and distribution center for the remains of 2 estates cured me of the desire to be a packrat).

good luck.

5

But which five? And what about all the others staring up at me with their sad little puppy dog eyes just begging not to be thrown into the county incinerator? :smiley:

6

I was sitting on the floor going through photo albums yesterday and realized I have a few of my mom’s…some of them are family but two are of her old friends and coworkers. I don’t even know these people but I hate thowing anything of hers away now that she’s gone. I should discard the photos and keep the albums for new pictures, but I just hate the thought of those pictures going to the dump for some goofy reason. So there they’ve sat for the past ten years. I take them out and look at them occasionally so they won’t feel lonely.

7

  1. Pennies. Thousands and thousands of pennies, sorted by date and mint mark.

  2. A very long “dear John” letter from my first bf, about 35 years ago.

  3. A 6-pack of Billy Beer (remember Jimmy Carter’s brother?).

  4. Cartons from all my stereo and computer components.

  5. T-shirts that will never fit me again.

  6. A few dozen ties that are hopelessly out of style.

  7. A tape of Frank Spangenberg’s first 5 games on Jeopardy!

8

I have boxes of academic stuff left over from my PhD. They represent hours spent photocopying journals (because this was in the dark ages before pdf or postscript versions were readily available over the internet). Some of these papers I barely glanced at, others were my constant companions for weeks or months. But sadly, I’m not doing that line of research any more. Probably never will again – the field has changed, I’ve left academics and gone into industry and even if I ever do wander back into an academic setting, I’ll probably do something far different. So for 10 years, these boxes have been schlepped around, moved from office to garage to spare room, and yet they represent a big enough chunk of my life that I can’t quite fling them to the curb.

Also still have 20 year old magazines containing articles I’ve written concerning technologies that no one has used in, well, almost 20 years.

9

How about a Compaq Portable? I don’t even know if it works since I don’t have any 5-inch floppies, much less any bootable 5-inch floppies with the likes of DOS 3 on them.

I do have a couple (seriously, just a couple) PC magazines heralding ancient things like the 386DX-25 (Fastest computer ever!)

For those, when I realized that I’d moved two 50-pound cartons of magazines twice without even opening it, I opened it and picked four or five to keep and blue-binned the rest. It is fun to look at them now and then and get goggle-eyed over the prices - $150 for a 3.5-inch floppy drive! - they’re what now, five bucks?

I did recently chuck a trophy I’d won for a “Pinewood Derby” race back when I was a wee lad in Cub Scouts.

10

Apple II, eh? I have copies of Sync magazine, for the ZX81; all my 1980s-style electronics magazines from when I was in school; and a whole bunch of Popular Science from 1960 and 1968-9. :smiley:

11

Have you considered selling them on an auction site? I don’t know what era yours are from, but I’ve seen many vintage photo albums (with pictures) sell for well over a hundred dollars apiece.

12

If anybody needs help throwing crap out, call me. I’ll come over and do the deed for travel expenses.

And to the OP specifically, maybe you should change your name to LonesomePackrat.

13

I can totally understand why you have hung onto those; I love old computer literature. One of my prized possessions is the hardback edition of the September 1966 issue of Scientific American; at the time the September issue for each year was devoted to a single topic, and that year it was computers.

For similar reasons I have kept my 1960 World Book encyclopedia. There isn’t much better than a contemporary source for giving you a window on the attitudes and culture of a time.

14

I had a similar situation with wargames and history magazines. No earthly use to me, using up space, yet it seemed such a waste to throw them out.

The solution I came up with was eBay. I sold them to some other hopeless packrat to clutter his house up with, and I was able to console myself with the thought that they were going to a good home.

15

I just last year got rid of a complete set of Amiga World magazines: every issue from launch in August, 1985 to the magazine’s demise in 1995 or 1996 (see, they were so worthless I can’t even remember when they quit showing up in my mailbox). I hadn’t looked at any of them five times in the last six or eight years.

16

Lucky you! My mom made me throw my Inciders out when we moved to Minnesota in 1990. Of course, if I had not, I would have the same problem you have. I’d love to read them again for the history (but don’t send them to me, my husband would kill me :).)

What Mom did not make me throw out…the Apple //c that inspired purchase of said magazines. It’s still at their house.

I moved a bunch of old Popular Photographys (1995-2000) to this house in 2002 and I’m wondering why. I only stopped subscribing because it was mostly ads and I was sick of being reminded how broke I was and all the neato camera stuff I could not buy. Of course, with the advent of digital, all that neato stuff would be obsolete now. But I can’t bear to throw them out, even though I don’t read or refer to them. Perhaps it’s because those magazines represent the end of an era.