One thing I learned after using computers for 34 years: As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it. I cannot see how that could be true for VGA and old centronics printer cables, but I shall not risk to find out.

This cuts deep

Firewire was awesome, and so was thunderbolt. Do you like USB-C? Cause that’s how we got there.

Cleaners broke the HDMI cable from the computer to the TV. Reached into my cable drawer and pulled out two good new ones. It was a very proud moment for me.

Sent this in a family group chat, referring to my dad. My kids found it funny because they claim it is me.

I recently pulled a DVI to VGA RadioShack branded cable to connect a camera system to an old monitor. The dopamine of victory is worth it fellow cable hoarders.

I have a box o' digital cables, a box o' analog cables, a box o' power cords, and a box o' power bricks.

The power cords and power bricks end up being useful once in a while.

As for the other boxes, I have never pulled anything but the most common cables, like standard USB or HDMI cables, out of there. You know, the ones that you can easily buy cheaply whenever you need them. I've been trying to convince myself to throw away those boxes for years.

At my house I have about 35 lighting cables from old iPhones. I married into an Apple family with 4 daughters. Their friends think I got a cable for everything lol. Which I probably do

Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.

Couldn’t agree more. FireWire’s Direct Memory Access was such a game changer for scrubbing video footage right from the camera.

There’s plenty of reasons to hate Apple but their I/O has never been one.

Core Audio, for instance, is practically magic. Absurdly low latency with no need for device drivers with hardware that’s class compliant. Just plug it in over USB-C.

In some ways, we all become our fathers I guess, lol.

That’s fucking goddamn right

So was Thunderbolt? I thought it was still a thing?

As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it.

This goes double for any cable that will be hard to get a new one of, so hold on to those centronics cables!

FireWire mentioned

I'm getting worried my din to PS2 keyboard adapter will never get used again

I've been working on this company for 3 years.

We have a "cable cabinet" that has around 50 different types of cables. Around 45 of them have been there from the early 90s. I still haven't used them. And none of my colleagues (some of which have been there for 20 years or more) have ever used them. Yet, everyone refuses to throw them away, we don't want to risk needing them and not finding them.

I've been working in AV for the past five years. The amount of times I've needed DVI and VGA is astounding.

It is still a thing. Many Laptops still have USB-C ports supporting Thunderbolt

That might just bring me to orgasm.

Especially when you bring time travel into the mix

Na, at that point through the device away.

I had a moment of validation almost identical to this and it was just as satisfying as you would imagine.

You seem knowledgeable on the subject, what the hell is 8 pin firewire? 400 has 6 pins, 800 has 9 and the small version for camcorders and stuff is 4.

This is where I keep my various lengths of wire

I never consented to this portrayal. Or it's distribution.

Worth pointing out that, just as a chimpanzee may not be particularly knowledgeable on the matter of chimpanzees, and fascists are generally not very well-educated on the history of Fascism, asking a cable to explain itself to you may not lead to the outcome you desire (although this FireWire cable does seem to be capable of producing at least some level of output, and stringing two words together is indicative of a greater capacity for thought than, for instance, a fascist)

I've got no idea. The original 400 was 6, the revision had 4 (lacking the powered pins) and 800 had 9. The only connector I can think of from the top of my head that uses 8 is mini-USB.

This perfectly captures the universal “box of random cables” every parent somehow kept for decades.

Not the expert you're asking but I have a tangential thing that has served no practical purpose until now lol...

9pins only used 8 of them. It was possible to use a 9th but nothing standard/typical ever did.

There. Been carrying that one around for ages.

I lost my BT earbuds 2 months ago, have a Type C phone, and just chucked out my ~5 Type C earbuds, because I had never used them since I got the Bluetooth one. I only left a pair of Jack earbuds. Guess where my Type C to Jack adapter went...

Sure. But it is not like own the shit to plug my modern hardware to VGA.

You, next week, browsing eBay: an 8K dpl projector, in box, with mounting kit, $15, no bids, ending in 8 minutes?!

You, a few seconds later: WHY IS IT ONLY VGA WHAT THE FU-

Story time:

I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when a relative, who was cleaning some junk out of the house, offered me a white 1st gen iPod Touch. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn't completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise. It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable.

The weather outside was what the Irish (with their particular brand of humor) might describe as "a soft fine day", and what I would refer to as "a relentless bone-chilling mist". We had no plans that day, so I located the nearest tech shop.

I arrived at this tiny shop in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I describe to the guy inside what I'm looking for. He presumably owns and runs the wee place alone, but he has no fucking clue. I couldn't really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB-C standard at that point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous "lightning" cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, a thick, wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack by around 2010.

The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on a small box containing "cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A" in trademark Apple white. Come to Papa. It was the very last one, surely at this particular shop, maybe in the entire region. After making sure it was actually still in the box, I forked over 8 euros for the thing while expressing immense surprise and gratitude to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item. I went back home with my quarry.

I plugged in the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule -- chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.

My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I "spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech", but for me it's a fond memory, and I'm serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy.

All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what might be the only tech shop in Connemara. He even looked like the guy in the meme! He must have figured that someday, someone like me might need it!

My Mom always throws out old cables like a week before I head over there and need that specific cable.

I have plenty of FireWire cables but I gave away all the computers that they plug into. Now I need a Lightning -> Thunderbolt -> FireWire 800 -> FireWire 400 -> iLink adapter chain and it would be cheaper to buy an old FireWire computer instead 🤦

I dig into my (organized) box of cables 2-3x a year. I still have functional older equipment that still sees occasional use.

Pro tip: go through the box and get rid of the duplicates of older items. No need to have 3 IDE ribbon cables, 4 SATA to 4-pin power adapters, or two parallel port cables.

The moral of the story is: don't throw away your unusual old cables.

List them for sale on ebay.

I'm not even a parent, and I got a crate of cables too.

I’ve been trying to convince myself to throw away those boxes for years.

As soon as the garbage truck hauls them off, you'll suddenly need one of them and have to go out and buy one.

+1 I only keep multiples of commonly used cables and I use ziplock bags to keep cables of the same type together in my cable box so it's easy to tell if I've accumulated too many.

One of the perks of working for a tech company on a hybrid schedule. They inventory the issued laptops, but that's about all they have time for. And every once in a while they clean out and let us take stuff home. After 5-ish years, I and the people closest to me will always have monitors, monitor stands, at least one working UPS and all the peripherals, HDMI and Ethernet cables we could ever need.

I had a FUCK of a time a couple weeks ago, oh my GAWD. I wanted a less insanely heavy-duty cable to connect my portable monitor to a temporary computer setup because the monitor was light, making it awkward. I looked through my Everyday Cable Drawer with no success. I’ve got a few routed around my displays in my house, but those are all bundled up and cable-managed.

So I go to my backup drawer, with assorted cables.

DisplayPort…

DisplayPort…

VGA…

DVI-D…

DVI-D…

DisplayPort…

HDMI… EXTENDER. Thick as shit.

It took me going to the Old Console Drawer and finding my bag of Switch accessories to find a Switch HDMI cable! I am completely out of HDMI backup cables that aren’t insanely heavy duty.

As with any other thing that is kept 'just in case', the size and effort to store in an organized way will be the reason for keeping or discarding something. I also keep at least one of each connector that I still have could possibly use either by something I own to tech that isn't too old for me to aquire due to needing something a week after throwing it out and having to buy an overpriced replacement.

Yes, this means I do have some ribbon connectors because I have older mobos and drives with those and VGA connectors since some of my monitors still have those as options.

My limit is one plastic tub though, with the older stuff on the bottom like sedimentary layers. When it gets full I pull it out and ditch the oldest stuff I no longer need and stack it back in. The next round will probably prompt me to ditch the older ribbon connectors and drives that use them.

Still around, but it’s no longer being actively developed. All effort is going into USB-C and turning it into what it was supposed to be 25 years ago.

Am parent, can confirm. But i started about 20 years before becoming a parent. To go ahead of the curve.

Nice. This guys hoards expert level.

These situations actually happen to me from time to time.