Computers & Recycling

Back in 1992 or 1991, I remember when a friend, who worked for Arthur Andersen at the time - walked me through the specifics of my first computer purchase. I was replacing a Sanyo MBC 1550 with two 5.25" floppy drives (all ROM memory) with a laptop. "80 Mb is all you'll need -- do you know how much typing you'll have to do to fill that up?"

That computer got me through the end of my senior year as an undergrad and through grad school. It was a black-and-white plasma screen (oooh!) and had Windows 3.1. I used Word Perfect 5.1 and PFS WindowWorks -- later acquired by Microsoft and turned into Excel and the basis for MS Office.

I now have a desktop machine with two external 400 Gb drives, two internal 400 Gb drives set up as a RAID array, an 80 Gb drive and a 200 Gb drive. That puts me at just over a Tb on my machine plus 800 Gb in the external drives... just like 1.88 Tb??

The 80 Gb drive was the original drive on this machine -- I put it together with my friend Bigox when I lived in SOMA in 2002... might be about time to replace my motherboard. I've been replacing fans with great frequency, it seems.

Fortunately, there's Green Citizen -- I can take all my computer junk to them and they'll recycle it. They take apart components that can be re-used and build new computers for school kids, and then break down the other stuff. There are a lot of items they'll take for free -- but you may have to pay a nominal fee (like fifty cents per pound) for other stuff.