High tech sticks

I've found some nice curiosities from years gone by whilst tidying up piles of old computing equipment over the years. Boxes of still sealed 5.25" floppy disks complete with enough tokens to collect a free clock, if the offer hadn't expired 12 years earlier. A still sealed 1MB memory upgrade kit for a Mac Plus, which may have subsequently actually got fitted to a Mac Plus. Earlier I found a particularly obscure example of old computing technology:

They look like something that might have been sold in a 1950s Chemist shop but flip the packet over and their actual origin is revealed

Yep, that's 100 genuine mint condition Sun Microsystems cotton swabs. Why would Sun sell cotton swabs? To use with Sun tape head cleaner of course

You can't see it in the photo but the swab part number on the cleaning fluid matches the part number of the swabs. Because obviously you couldn't just use any old bits of cotton on a stick with your Sun tape header cleaner.

I've no idea how old this stuff is or what kind of tapes drives it was for use with. Early BBC Micro era generic audio cassette tapes in a WH Smiths branded tape deck aside, the only tape storage systems I've ever used have been DDS 3/4 units where the heads were safely inside the box out of the reach of 6 inch sticks. Come to think of it I know where there is a pile of SCSI DDS3/4 drives and still sealed tapes.

Mike Willis : 10 Sep 2008 12:42 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem