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

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:<\/p>\n

– A motherboard
\n– Floppy disks (I swear I won\u2019t tell anyone I got them from you)
\n– Hard disks
\n– An old desktop tower (I want them to be able to look at the back at all the inputs involved-doesn\u2019t have to work)
\n– Mouse with track ball <\/p>\n

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!!!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

– 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.)<\/p>\n

– 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.)<\/p>\n

– 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.)<\/p>\n

– 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.)<\/p>\n

– 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.)<\/p>\n

I also threw a couple of RAM chips and an old SMC NIC in for good measure.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Everybody’s a winner!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}