When Was The Last Time You Dumpster Dove? :)

[2112st]

I'll start. Lessee...

It's been a long time!! Late 1990s?? I got a Centris 650 that way in the Tribeca area of New York City. A number of buddies and I were notified that a company was getting rid of a lot of computer stuff. We went down there. A light rain was in progress. There were A TON of CRTs, Macs & PC. I found a Centris 650, minus the cover, which had been soaked with rain water. I brought it home and let it dry for a month. I then started it, and that sucker booted right to desktop.

I imagine dumpster diving is a lot harder these days, depending where you are, of course.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I don’t dumpster dive as an hobby but I acquired my first PowerPC Mac this way in 2014. A quicksilver g4 was out on the curb (with trash) getting rained on so I snagged it. The other thing I snagged from discard/trash was from the back of a true value. They just remodeled and were junking the old counter bits. I spotted a still very usable old segment of counter. It wasn’t in the dumpster either but was for the taking next to it (waaaay too big to fit in a dumpster) so I took it, bought some nice caster wheels from the same store, screwed em onto the bottom and that thing completed my garage bench.

 

[2112st]

I don’t dumpster dive as an hobby but I acquired my first PowerPC Mac this way in 2014. A quicksilver g4 was out on the curb (with trash) getting rained on so I snagged it. The other thing I snagged from discard/trash was from the back of a true value. They just remodeled and were junking the old counter bits. I spotted a still very usable old segment of counter. It wasn’t in the dumpster either but was for the taking next to it (waaaay too big to fit in a dumpster) so I took it, bought some nice caster wheels from the same store, screwed em onto the bottom and that thing completed my garage bench.

How did the G4 turn out? Did it have an HD? If you were able to boot it up, what was it running?

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

How did the G4 turn out? Did it have an HD? If you were able to boot it up, what was it running?

It was intact and running Tiger 10.4.11. It was a single 733mhz education model, 512mb pc133 sdram, iirc 40gb hdd and 32mb mmx. I’ve since upgraded it to dual 1ghz dcard, 1.5gb ram, 120gb SSD & a radeon9000 gpu, pci usb2, BT, & pci WiFi & scsi. It’s one of my favorite macs I own I drive an adc acrylic Cinema Display that is perfect for the QS aesthetic.

One of these days I’ll score a Zip drive for it. I love the way those look. I’d consider a magneto drive but I have a bunch of zip stuff across machines & is easier on the wallet lol.

 

[Volvo242GT]

Haven't personally done it, but a buddy of mine found my old Mac Pro sitting on the curb in his neighborhood. 6GB RAM, 8-core 2.8 GHz early 2008 A1186. No hard drives or drive sleds. Did have a Radeon HD 5770 video card installed. Brought it home, took the 160GB hard drive from the A1181 MacBook that had suffered a cherry coke spill to the keyboard, connected a monitor and a keyboard+mouse to the Mac Pro, hit the power button, and it booted to 10.6.8 without problems. Used that machine for 6 years, before retiring it, after I somehow knocked loose a heatsink clip hold-down for the PCI bus chip, and caused the cooling fans to go bonkers whenever I'd go to Google Maps, etc.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Truthfully I have not ever found or run into any cool computer find from an actual dumpster. Lots of cool free and low $$ CL scores over the years but I never was lucky enough to drive by a dumpster, look over and find something cool. I think the closest was next to a goodwill drop-off. I donated some furniture and some still very usable hung wood cabinetry from a remodel a couple years ago (maybe this was 2020?) when I saw an 17" Intel CoreDuo iMac box next to the dumpster ... which really isn't very cool or exciting I guess. I left it there but in hind site I kind of wish I had taken it because I now have a 17" ICD iMac which lives in my 6y/o sons room on his desk. It would've been nice to have an actual box to store it in when I upgrade him to a 2008 20" alu iMac.

 

[reallyrandy]

I'm a hobbyist woodworker so I always grab old furniture made from quality hardwoods. I've seen old walnut dressers and tables in the trash before where the wood alone is worth $100 or more. I take it apart and I've some nice expensive hardwood to make whatever I want.
Finding vintage Macs at this point in time is exceedingly rare.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I get alot of wood this way as well. Saved from projects and stuff that sometimes just gets left out for pickup. Im no wood worker per se but I have a nice stash of quality wood in my garage overhead from this. If you were to go buy quality high grade wood these days, man its SO expensive.

 

[Kai Robinson]

I'd love to go dumpster diving....but unfortunately, most skips here are just full of utter crap. Never anything good. If you go to the recycling place to drop off your e-waste, they don't let you take anything away, even if another person offers it to you, they get actually angry and tell you to leave. Such a shame, because i've seen newer machines than i have, being taken away and junked

 

[Paolo B]

Many years ago I pulled a bunch of Apple II GS out of a flooded container at a recycling site. They were dismissed machines from a nearby US military base.
I literally bought them by the weight. Amazingly enough, though, they were all still in working conditions, despite the water and the rust. I kept one complete set up for me (I still have it) and traded the other units. After that episode, though, I could only find crap or overpriced machines not worth the trouble.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I'd love to go dumpster diving....but unfortunately, most skips here are just full of utter crap. Never anything good. If you go to the recycling place to drop off your e-waste, they don't let you take anything away, even if another person offers it to you, they get actually angry and tell you to leave. Such a shame, because i've seen newer machines than i have, being taken away and junked

This recycler mentality never made sense to me although the recyclers I know around here are nice people and would find a solution vs being a jerkus about it.

I wonder if something like Free Geek could exist in the UK diverting good, useable hardware back into the community. That as a business/reuser/recycler model sounds really fun and rewarding actually.

 

[joethezombie]

I found an original Macintosh in a dumpster in rural Idaho around 2015 while I was throwing out some trash. I'm not in the area very often, but I always check that dumpster 4 or 5 times a year ever since.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Yanno, I lie. I did find a little AT case and (if rough memory serves me) C2Duo or maybe it was an AMD Phenom Compaq at the dumpster of my condo before I moved so this was probably around 2016. I cleaned it up, repasted the guts, slapped a decent silent no-fan GPU in there along with pci wireless, IIRC upgraded the os to MS10 and donated the Compaq to a local Catholic charity ... not before I installed Quake4 and played that on my TV for a few days of course.

Of course I left disk 4 (I think) in it when I donated it. Yanno how it goes. No good deed ever goes unpunished.

EVER.

lol

But thats ok, I'd do it again (and I do each time I find a solid orphan on CL for example) as its best to get solid boxes into the hands of those families/people in our communities who really need them. I still haven't bought another copy of Q4, so it wasn't that devastating of a loss Besides, that is a truly scary game so if I started playing that again, inevitably my 6 & 4 y/os would watch me and then they wouldnt go to sleep for a week, so at the end of the day QUAKE4 < SLEEP

 

[Kai Robinson]

This recycler mentality never made sense to me although the recyclers I know around here are nice people and would find a solution vs being a jerkus about it.

I wonder if something like Free Geek could exist in the UK diverting good, useable hardware back into the community. That as a business/reuser/recycler model sounds really fun and rewarding actually.

It would be very popular... If people would commute to it. Not enough critical mass for it to succeed as a storefront -

Also, business rates, commercial rental prices are through the roof - it'd open and fold within a month.

 

[2112st]

It would be very popular... If people would commute to it. Not enough critical mass for it to succeed as a storefront -

Also, business rates, commercial rental prices are through the roof - it'd open and fold within a month.

Hey dude-I've seen your streams with Steve! You've got a nice collection of Macs! I hope to be at VCF East on this side of the pond in a couple of weeks.

 

[2112st]

I'd love to go dumpster diving....but unfortunately, most skips here are just full of utter crap. Never anything good. If you go to the recycling place to drop off your e-waste, they don't let you take anything away, even if another person offers it to you, they get actually angry and tell you to leave. Such a shame, because i've seen newer machines than i have, being taken away and junked

Question: what about schools, when they decide to do upgrades? How difficult is it to get your hands on computers from them?

 

[2112st]

Many years ago I pulled a bunch of Apple II GS out of a flooded container at a recycling site. They were dismissed machines from a nearby US military base.
I literally bought them by the weight. Amazingly enough, though, they were all still in working conditions, despite the water and the rust. I kept one complete set up for me (I still have it) and traded the other units. After that episode, though, I could only find crap or overpriced machines not worth the trouble.

Years ago, a friend and I met up with this guy in Central New Jersey (USA) and he had A TON (probably literally a ton, LOL!) of computers that once belonged to NASA-a bunch of Macs, Suns, and I think some SGIs. We filled just about every inch of my friend's VW van with computers; it's amazing WE were able to sit in it!!!