One thing we try to do is keep an eye on thrift stores in various nearby cities and purchase old software and components. If you happened to read our Building A Vintage Windows 95 Pentium PC article over at OMGWTFBBQ, you’d see that we do keep some older x86 based computers in our tech collection. Part of the vintage PC experience includes running software of the era off the original media. Software CDs don’t really take up much physical space in our storage so we actively purchase old software we find at thrift stores. In cases where the software is so rare that a digital copy doesn’t already exist online, we would create an image of the software disc and add it to our online archive.
In a recent trip to the Vancouver area in BC, Canada we ended up visiting three Value Village locations and also the Free Geek thrift store. The software titles were our main priority but we also did come across a few other goodies including 3.5″ floppy disk storage containers, a Microsoft PS/2 mouse and a Microsoft SideWinder game pad with the 15 pin port for 90’s era PCs. It would be great if we could also find actual old computers but it seems most thrift stores won’t bother putting any out for sale.
