Last weekend, an old friend of mine from high school e-mailed me (along with half a dozen other people) the following request:

As some of you may already know, I have been asked to teach a beginning MIS course this semester. This course is a basic introduction to computers. The first section of the class describes the basics of a computer, etc. In order to make that section a bit more colorful I thought it would be nice to have some actual physical objects to look at instead of the pictures in the book-BORING! I am looking for the following items for my “show and tell” lecture next week:

– A motherboard
– Floppy disks (I swear I won’t tell anyone I got them from you)
– Hard disks
– An old desktop tower (I want them to be able to look at the back at all the inputs involved-doesn’t have to work)
– Mouse with track ball

These are just a few of the items I will be searching for this weekend. If you have any of them and would like to donate to the cause please let me know. Thanks!!!

I e-mailed my friend back immediately and said, “I have everything on your list. Let me know when you would like it delivered.” I then spent the next 10 minutes walking around the house and collected:

– A motherboard (I bought a machine off of Craigslist a couple of years ago that never did work right. Recently I used the tower as a case to hold my RAID5 disk drives. The machine’s motherboard has been leaning up against my trash can for weeks.)

– Floppy disks (I wasn’t sure if she wanted 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 floppies, so I grabbed one of each. Believe it or not, I have more spare 5 1/4 disks lying around than I have 3 1/2’s at this point.)

– Hard disks (grabbed two from the “bad” stack. Why do I have a stack of bad hard drives lying around? I guess for things like this.)

– An old desktop tower (walked out to the garage and grabbed the first computer from the top of the “machines too old/slow to run Windows XP but might make a nice Linux box someday” pile. P3/700, I think.)

– Mouse with track ball (couldn’t find an old serial one so I just grabbed the one off my PC and threw it in the pile. Replaced it with a USB laser one … been meaning to do that for a while.)

I also threw a couple of RAM chips and an old SMC NIC in for good measure.

My friend was very gracious to receive the parts and didn’t seem too surprised when I told her I could probably deliver similar piles every day for a month. Susan is always glad to see old hardware leaving rather than coming, so she was pleased. I was just glad someone was going to get some use out of a bunch of hardware that was too new to be collectible, but too old to be usable.

Everybody’s a winner!