You may say, this is bad advice but I am beginning to think this is a good idea, within reason. In particualr, keep an old computer that bridges the technology gap that you deal with. In my case, I am keeping an old P3 450Mhz computer simply to install my old copy of Windows 98 on for those weird cases that come up that you need an older OS. And those cases do happen!
Today at work we ran into a situation where we needed to hook up an old parallel port Iomega Ditto tape drive to retrieve a some files. 6 months earlier I pulled this Ditto drive out of the trash when I saw what tapes it could read. Thankfully we still have a machine with Windows 95 in the building to hook it up to. I did some searching for Windows NT/2000/XP drivers but guess what, they don’t exist. So lesson learned, keep the stuff if if may come in handy later.
Keep this in reason. I decided a few months ago to finally throw out the 5.25″ floppy drive. But I came to the conclusion after having it for 5 years without ever touching it that it was now safe to let it go.
