Plaidophile

Examples:

• Developer preview releases of BeOS 3, 4, and 4.5 — these wouldn't even work on a modern system (at best, there'd be slow video and no networking), even though they're way ahead of all of the current OS offerings.
• A gold CD-R with green ink, unburned — I think this disc cost me $3, but it probably won't even work in a current CD-R burner. Not that it matters since I have a huge pile of CD-Rs which cost me around $3 total.
• Developer documentation to the Commodore 128 — I never did get around to coding a demo in 6510 assembly...
• SCSI-1 cables! YAAAAY I can hook up all of those 2GB hard drives and 300dpi fluorescent-light scanners which I might want to add to my system! Well, if I had a system with a spare ISA slot for this SCSI card, anyway...
• HP ScanJet 3P (see above)
• 4x CD-ROM drive
• Lots and lots of PS/2 keyboards (I swear, they started to breed as soon as I no longer needed them)
• a nonfunctional SGI Indigo (which I keep meaning to convert to a refrigerator for cans, which I will call a Refrigigo if I ever get around to doing it)
• A Viewsonic E771 monitor, which needs (very minor) repair. It's still a very nice monitor (which originally cost $450), especially compared to the $50 crapfests you buy at CompUSA, and I don't want to throw it out, but nobody else wants it (since they don't want to repair it) and I've switched to LCDs so I don't even want it for dualhead purposes.
• Big tangles of power cables. Why could I never find any whenever I needed them?
• I/O Magic Magicimage 420 digital camera — it's only 1.2 megapixel (1280x960), it overcompresses the images (unless you have it store it at 1600x1200 which makes it even slower and fills up the SmartMedia card exponentially quickly), its CCD is absolute crap, and it only connects via DB-9 serial port (making it one of the few reasons why I ever boot up my Linux workstation anymore). Nobody else I know wants it (since they already have better digital cameras and/or don't have DB-9 serial) but I have basically no use for it (since it's not good enough for anything but disposable snapshots, which I don't do)
• Piles of crap headphones
• around 400 feet of cat-5 cable in good condition (the only friend of mine who has any future networking plans doesn't want it because his networking plans are way in the future and he doesn't want to trip on it in the meantime); this I'll probably give to Delphine for craft projects or something. (It's lengths cut for running under carpet. Part of why I pulled it was because I never got around to running it under the carpet, because I was going to do that when I got new carpet anyway. Which isn't going to happen.)
• Piles of driver discs for hardware which I still have but for operating systems which I don't. (But what if I end up selling this AirPort card to someone running OS9, huh?!)
• Datahand ultra-ergonomic keyboard — I saved up my pennies to buy this, and it turned out to cause more trouble than good (I'm still getting past some of the bad typing habits it instilled in me), and it needs PS/2 ports anyway (which are becoming rare), and in particular it needs a PS/2 mouse port which initializes even if it doesn't detect something plugged in immediately at powerup (which are even more rare) since it takes a little while for the circuit to come online.
• All these shovelware games which came with soundcards in aeons past which I never got around to trying, since they wouldn't even run in Win'95 when I got them. (But they'll probably run in DOS Box, which ironically gives the Mac better DOS gaming compatability than WinXP has.)
• A serial Palm sync cradle (I still have the Palm, actually, and it works though I don't have much use for it since my cellphone has taken over its role in my life), and a serial Palm travel cable (which I bought with the assumption that any laptop I got would have a serial port, just before laptops stopped coming with serial ports). I also have a USB sync/charge cable which is apparently worth more than the Palm itself.
• An old Macintosh serial MIDI interface, given to me when I was still a DOS weenie who swore I'd never, ever buy a Mac. The cost to add a serial port to my Mac would cost just as much as to buy a decent USB MIDI box. Though apparently this is a good model (Altech MIDIFace EX), even though it only has one input (three outputs, though, enough for a decent-sized studio)