A floppy disk in a filing cabinet…
And then a 5.25″ floppy! (“Mini” because it isn’t 8″ in diameter)
Two baby carriages (our youngest is almost 6)
Inch-thick folder of vet documents for Alex the Samoyed, who died in 2009, including instructions on how to inject a dog or cat with an intramuscular vaccine (but we’re told to worship the health care professionals who stick us with COVID-19 vaccines?):
Cleaning the dog’s teeth was $700 back in 2005. Lately the same place has been charging closer to $3,000.
Windows XP “Start Here” booklet. (Plus a bunch of accessories to go with a PC that was running XP. Which reminds me… who can think of a truly important Windows 10 feature that wasn’t also there on XP?)
Chinese pumpkin seeds that expired in 2018 (hiding behind some batteries in a kitchen drawer):
Multiple flip-phones, still a better design in my opinion!
A cleaning system for those valuable CDs:
An amazing Nakamichi clock radio with a long wire so that a second speaker can be placed on the opposing night table. Wake up to NPR and hear some more about January 6!
Deeply buried in a box of clutter that hadn’t been opened since at least 2014:
Printed tables of function values that were too tedious to compute:
A businessperson-turned-politician that we laughed at (but at age 66, wouldn’t she likely do a better job than Uncle Joe?):
It was not a “tough choice” to discard Tough Choices.
Kodak Carousel projector, improved with a Schneider lens, and accessories.
Decommissioned (I hope!) EPIRBs/PLBs.
“The unexamined life is not worth living” certainly applies to boxes in the garage!
You’re running a garbage collection algorithm on all your possessions.
Hey, those Maxwell MD2HD/96TPIs were the ones used in the IBM PC/AT (80286 6Mhz, 1984, etc.) in its 1.2 MB floppy drive, which I recall as a minor miracle coming from the “big” DS/DD 360Kb format. You needed the good media and had to store and handle them carefully, but wow! a box of them and you could back up your OEM 20MB CMI hard drive every day before it failed, you bought a Core Performance or a Priam and one or the other company tossed it into the ocean off the coast of Boca Raton to ding Don Estridge, I suppose (which actually happened.) Had a ton of them at one point. Fun days.
The protocol to access whitespace (PAWS) & the predecessor of modern HDL languages, the JEDEC II file format disappeared from the internet by 2017. Baby boomers spoke a different language.
Why would cleaning a dog’s teeth cost 700 dollars much less 3000? That is well outside the limit after which the dog gets euthanized instead of receiving medical intervention. (I mean, in sane person world.) But teeth cleaning? Is dog picture day coming up and we need him to look his snarling best? He can’t go chew on some leather?
Dogs have all of the same dental issues as humans, other than cavities from eating sugar. If you don’t want a dog to develop stinky breath, you usually will need to brush his/her/zir/their teeth and also occasionally pay for a cleaning, which gets under the gums (anesthesia adds a lot to the cost, since the dog can’t be made to sit sufficiently still). Wild animals chew on a lot more stuff that will clean their teeth and also they tend to die before they can develop gum disease.