After a few years of reviews, I've got a big pile of operating systems and other software that is either several versions out of date or otherwise unable to be used anymore. When I moved to another city, I didn't have the time to sort through them and consider their future, so I put them all in one big box and shipped them to my new house. Now I'm unpacking things and don't know what to do with old copies of such golden oldies as Red Hat Linux 9 and Xandros Desktop 1.0. Does it all just go into the garbage? Should I sell them on eBay? Give them to charity? What do you do with old retail box software? What about old computer books, manuals, and parts?

They're all so neatly packed, some of them installed only a couple of times for testing and evaluation. It's not just free software in the pile -- some of it is proprietary. There's a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 that is licensed for press evaluation only; a copy of Adobe Creative Suite under similar licensing terms sits beside it.

For reviews, it's always a good idea to keep a recent version of a GNU/Linux distribution so that you can compare it to a new version. There's no need to keep more than one, though, and certainly I don't need so many retail boxes lying around, let alone the 400-page distro manuals and media kits. I've already thrown out the duplicates and the distros that never worked at all (I threw out two boxed sets of Lycoris Desktop/LX), but there is really no need to keep any of this software anymore.

As you can see in the photo (which does not include everything in my collection), I have several old DOS games from the now defunct Sierra On-Line game company. Some of them are real classics, like Betrayal at Krondor and Quest For Glory. Some are on 5.25" floppy, some on 3.5", and one or two are actually on CD. These may be worth money to a collector somewhere, so I'll put a few of them up on eBay and see what they sell for. Some things, like the Macromedia and Adobe suites, cannot legally be sold or given away, so I have to "destroy" them, according to the license agreements. I have some ideas on how I might go about destroying them, but that's for another article.

And then there are the books. I don't have as many books as I do software boxes, but the book pile is growing at a much faster pace because I'm now writing book reviews, and these days, software companies more commonly send download editions of software instead of retail boxes. Looking on my book shelf, I have DOS 6 for the Guru Wanna-be (a very handy book in its day); TurboPascal, the Ultimate Pascal Development Environment version 3.0 circa 1986 (there's a 5.25" floppy with the TurboPascal IDE on it around somewhere, too); C++ Primer, 2nd Edition by Stanley Lippman (from way back in high school, where this was the textbook for a C++ elective course); and several books on Solaris system programming that I got for free at the Solaris 10 launch event last year. I don't know why I wanted the Solaris books -- I will never need to develop native Solaris applications. I don't even use Solaris on any of my regular machines.

TurboPascal is obviously dead and buried, but what about the C++ book? Is that still valid for modern C++ programming? And do I even need it if I'm now reading Learning Java, 3rd Edition to get back into programming?

Those are the books that survived the first book purge. I already dumped a pile of DEC Rainbow manuals, documentation for an old Dell laptop machine, and two copies of the Windows 3.0 manuals. Aside from the Java book, I haven't even mentioned all of the current, still-in-print computer books that I have on my shelf. They're in the old book queue too -- they just don't know it yet.

And don't get me started on old computer parts. I've thrown out several 1200 and 2400 baud ISA modems and serial port controller cards; an entire 386DX/40 computer that had no PCI slots; proprietary Sony and Teac CD-ROM drives (they were more than $300 new, and here I am throwing them away); and I'll soon be throwing out an NEC 386SX/20 that doesn't power up anymore. I used that during high school and I'd like to see what's on the hard drive.

Some computer parts can't be legally thrown into the garbage because they contain heavy metals and other hazardous materials. I looked into "recycling" some of my throwaways, but there were substantial fees involved. What's the incentive to obey the law and help the environment when it costs more to dispose of old monitors and motherboards the legal way? Are the garbage police going to throw me in jail for putting old monitors out by the side of the road?

So what do you do with your old computer stuff?

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Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.