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One possibility is to establish build your own computer (software) museum 
The only remaining issue is that nowadays, noone really cares for history, computer guys even less than the man in the street. Maybe you can get a journalist to write a story for your local (web) newspaper. Maybe a few people will read past the story of the headline, but very few (if any at all) will come to see your museum. If anyone comes, they will walk one short round with a blank face, and leave the place without a single question. Maybe they ask if there is a place where they can buy a cup of coffee or a coke.
It really doesn't make a difference if you establish that museum or not: In either cases, people have no real interest in it. So why bother. It is the same with your old photo albums, your library, your recipe collection, your Super-8 and VHS movies from when your kids (/grandkids) where little: The only person caring for it is yourself. When your heirs come to clean up after you, they'll throw all of it in the garbage. Even childhood movies of themselves: How many years (/decades) have passed since you last watched old family movies with them?
When you realize that you will never yourself ever take something old stuff into use, then you can be assured that noone else will care for it, either.
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I have a saying.
Nostalgia is a prison if you choose to live there.
Thanksgiving (USA) week 2008 a fire started in a home two doors down from us. The fire damaged seven homes including the back half of mine. Turns out those fiberglass shower remodels are very flammable. My office shared a common wall with the bathroom and most of my computer documentation, books, magazines, and physical software was destroyed.
I had been a bit of a hoarder regarding computer stuff. After the fire I ended up throwing away a lot of PC XT/AT clone boards and things that I salvaged from customer upgrades over the years. Basically, I started fresh moving forward.
But there are some things that I really do wish I could find a dozen years after the fact. It’s almost all documentation and some software.
I had user guides and service guides for older equipment that I have seen people ask in vintage computer forums. I had never digitized them and now can’t. This isn’t older versions of current items, but unique items when CP/M, Flex and OS/9 were popular, in the late 70’s and very early 80’s. There was a lot of history there.
I had a collection of manuals from the late 80’s and 90’s for PC multi-function cards and motherboards. I see retro computer channels that could have used that information.
The other stuff I really haven’t missed or really would have been able to do anything with today.
One recuring thought I do have is that I had a Motorola/Hitachi 6809 based PC from Canon. Same Canon that makes cameras, copiers, calculators, etc. I would have liked to see if I could have gotten OS9 or Flex running on it. All I really need is the memory map of the computer to answer the question, but I haven’t found any documentation.
I keep looking.
Rich Shealer
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I bought my son an old IBM Selectric typewriter for $3 that was supposedly in working condition, but back home, the main shaft was frozen. I used to fix them, but forgot a lot of details, especially about timing, and could not find an IBM manual, even from IBM, that described how to service it, so after describing to my son how it was supposed to work, I threw the IBM Selectric away. The end.
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Most companies keep a very limited history of their products. Information, like history, is ephemeral.
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Bruce Patin wrote: I threw the IBM Selectric away
Why didn't you let him tear it apart? At least under the suggestion that he try to fix it himself?
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I think I did suggest that, but he wasn't interested.
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Not unless you have an "old" computer to go with it. I still have my Atari. And Genesis. And ...
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I often wish I had kept old copies of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, but it's not like I'd use them today.
I do have my copies of Turbo BASIC and PFS:First Choice -- the manuals on a shelf behind me and the content of the 5.25" floppies copied to hard drive.
Turbo BASIC was still functional under Win 7 (though the graphics package didn't work), but not under Win 10  .
There was an abandonware site I think I uploaded them to a few years back.
Some other old disks (3.5") I have contain "fonts" and such -- Star Trek fonts in particular.
I think I must still have my Microsoft Musical Instruments CD around here somewhere.
I must have discarded the various "After Dark" versions I had as well.
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As soon as you discard it, you will need something in there. Someone's law also says that it will not be available anywhere else.
I resurrected an old mothballed Dell server, running ESXi, to test Chris's AI and Blue Iris surveillance software. Put a W10 VM and a Linux VM for same. Been running for several months. Yesterday, iDRAC complained about a drive failure. All drives (10) are mirrored with a hardware RAID (5 mirrors). Only one is in use. Guess which one failed? 
So, I VPN'd in to that LAN and tried to log into the iDRAC. Browsers wouldn't connect due to outdated SSL stuff. Went to my hidden cabinet-of-shame archive, copied and fired up an old W7 VM, logged in with IE, got the size of the hard drive that had failed, and ordered a replacement. All from 50 miles away. Hoping the survivor lasts until next week.
I had come close to trashing the old drive containing the archive of VM's and assorted software.
I just increased the size of the drives in my trueNAS system to avoid throwing anything away.
Go ahead, trash stuff.
Murphy is out there .............................................................waiting.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I had to search for a windows XP SP3 to make a VM for a relative because he was very good with an image editor from MS Office 2000 and he didn't feel like learning something a bit more contemporany.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Handy stuff. I still have a database application (Visual FoxPro) that I run in an XP VM.
I installed Office 2K on a W10 system, telling it to ignore the error that came up during install. Outlook wouldn't run but everything else that I tried did.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Kepp in mind that many of those old CDs will not be readable at all. They don't age well. My copy of VS 2012 left me that way.
Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Roger Wright wrote: with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal
Winning arguments? Such as 'I remember way back when when xxx had yyy and it worked a lot better then!'. And then 'Err...no...I just looked at my reference from 1996 and it did not have yyy...'
Roger Wright wrote: lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs
Nostalgia?
Antiques? My friend has every (boxes, manuals, etc) from every game system he has bought back to the 80s (or 70s). Sometimes that can end up being real money such as an original Apple computer (look up the price)
Unusual utility? I worked at a company where a larger customer wanted us to upgrade an application that ran on thousands of install computers. Something like Windows 3.1 or 95. We (or they) had the original source code but at that time there was absolutely no access to the original tools used to build and work on the code. But I had saved all those CDs from Windows MSDN program. So I found the old IDE and we were able to provide a successful update for the customer.
Other than that there are sites that sell miscellaneous stuff. You don't have to make money but if someone is will to pay at least the shipping then they presumably have some interest (perhaps one of the ones I mentioned above.)
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Biggest reason to keep old VS releases is that these still have tooling for otherwise supported, but not cool anymore MS technologies. Like SQL Compact, for example.
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A number of times I've had to dig out one or other "obsolete" piece of software, IDE, tools, whatever, to either upgrade something to work on a more recent platform or fix a bug for a customer (paying for the service). So I wouldn't ditch anything just because it's "old". And never ditch books; knowledge is never useless, just needs the right context to come along!
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When I moved to another state 8 years ago I did some additional clearing. I get a Facebook memories post around March 1st showing pictures of some old Novell Netware CNE and Microsoft MCSE study books (thick ones) from the 90's from publishers that no longer exist.
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Keep it. Maybe you will need after a post-apocalyptic future. And if you have a Windows XP computer, you will be the master of the world. 
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Provided that you've got 230VAC available in your post-apocalyptic world. And replacement keyboards when the old one starts failing due to dirt. And your screen fails, but none of your spare ones can take the VGA signals from your old XP computer. And still usable ink for you ink jet printer. And ...
There is a completely different problem: When your network connection fails - and in a post-apocalyptic world, it will - what are you going to use your PC for? No Google, no FaceBook or Twitter, no music or video streaming for entertainment, no weather forecast service, no whatever.
You can of course use the PC to write down you private thoughts (but without a working printer, you can't distribute them to others) and a spreadsheet for keeping track of your supplies. Maybe a pencil and a few sheets of paper is good enough for such tasks.
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trønderen wrote: Provided that you've got 230VAC available
Amazing what solar cells are doing these days.
I saw an add for an electric mountain bike which comes with an optional solar cells which can do a full charge in a day. Pretty sure that will run the PC for a while.
My next door neighbor uses them to charge up his camper.
trønderen wrote: And replacement keyboards when the old one...
Just saying it beats the alternative of fantasizing about dirt farming using a stick.
trønderen wrote: what are you going to use your PC for?
Entertain the kids.
Encyclopedia (we are talking about old software which used to exist like that on CD/DVD.)
Use Excel (not 365) to track the output of your slaves in the fields.
trønderen wrote: Maybe a pencil and a few sheets of paper is good enough for such tasks.
Except of course those run out also. Although with the Encyclopedia you can probably figure out how to make them.
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Software? Sure, a few years ago I turned every CD and DVD that I still didn't have in ISO format yet into a file, and put them all on my NAS (multi-TB disks are cheap and only getting cheaper). Then I got rid of the physical media. There's exceptions (games and such that can't be converted because of copy protection), but this takes comparatively so little room I haven't bothered to do anything them. At one point I suspect I'll just get rid of 'em - I don't really see myself playing Wing Commander on modern hardware...and if I ever have to scratch that itch, I suspect there's an emulator out there.
Physical stuff...the odds that someone is looking for something specific, and knows you're the one to contact, are so small it's not worth the physical space the stuff is taking. Years ago I had salvaged some brand new X-Window books (low-level GUI programming for Unix), still in their shrink-wrap - a whole shelf worth of them - from a company that went under...had them in a box for maybe a decade, but then I realized I would never make use of them, and the stuff by then was already so old it was never going to be useful to anyone (certainly not me). So that went for recycling, along with many OS/2 books (to give you an idea of how long ago that was)...
As others have said - technology doesn't age well. I have no problem getting stuff digitized, no matter how arcane, but physical stuff is rarely useful. I wouldn't hang onto some piece of hardware as a potential replacement for something someone needs when theirs breaks (is it really your problem to solve?) Besides, replacing something broken with something that's just as old and has been sitting on a shelf for years is just kicking the can further down the road; that system, if it's actually useful, needs to be replaced.
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dandy72 wrote: I don't really see myself playing Wing Commander on modern hardware...
If you know how to slow down virtual hardware in a VM you can really play as old games as that or even more. Someone I know manage to get a win 98 working just to play some really old games.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Stop hoarding. Quit cluttering your life just because "somebody might want it someday."
Applies to more than just software. Don't leave a houseful of junk to sift through, like my mother's generation did to us.
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We recently had a member share their blog with us that contained a lot of entries about old software and hardware.
Revisiting Borland Turbo C/C++, A Great IDE back in the 90s[^]
It was a good reminder that some people (for whatever reason) have to use legacy code or systems and this developer's blog is dedicated to those people.
If you're going to keep old things, I can see having this level of dedication and reaching that tiny niche of people who need it would be valuable. Otherwise ...
My father was a pack rat. One day I looked in his closest and found books on things like Excel 3.0. I cannot imagine someone needing that book ever again. And it wasn't just books. It was hardware, software, other manuals, and empty boxes that contained hardware and software. When he died, it was difficult to explain to my Mom that none of this junk was ever going to help anyone, and the amount of effort it would take to find those people, ultimately, would not be worth it. You couldn't even put these items in a museum, because no such museum exists. The things you own end up owning you, and when you're gone, your loved ones. Those that would benefit from these relics are highly specialized and don't need your help. And because they won't live forever, the systems that these unicorns maintain will be replaced for any number of reasons.
Burn it all.
Thanks,
Sean Ewington
CodeProject
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Does it spark joy? If so, keep it. If not deep six it.
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