For cheap or free

[spacebug]

We have some stuff that we're getting rid of 'round the office.

Powermac 7200/90. Oooooh. Big. Beige. Slow. Snap up this baby before anyone else does! Please. Please, take it away.

Mac G3 desktop with monitor. Also big, beige, and slow, but not as much. Need a bridge between your zippy new machine and your floppy disks? This is your man.

APS DAT drive. For all your tape backups!

Intel pro/100+ Adapter. Still in box in cellophane.

HP Laserjet IIP. As far as I know, it works.


Also might have copies of Filemaker Pro and a vintage laptop or two, I'll keep you posted.

Also, purely hypothetically, if you had a huge pile of tape backups that you saw no good reason to keep, how would you destroy them?

Comments

[sarendipatree.livejournal.com]

If you're just worried about the redistribution of the data contained on the tapes, a bulk demagnetizer would do the trick. In lieu of a bulk demagnetizer, simply holding the tape in front of a 21 CRT and hitting the degauss button oughta work adequately.

If you're lookoing for creative ideas, I leave that to your devious imagination.

[(Anonymous)]

Basically all modern CRTs degauss automatically on power on. They pump AC line current through a shut-off thermistor to the degaussing coil which is around the yoke (quite some distance from the screen, typically).

And yet video tapes, set-top Tivos, etc., etc., regularly survive. It either takes a strong field directly in contact with the media (aka a write head) or an extremely strong field not too far from tape.

Also note, the Faraday cage effect does not apply to magnetism, only to electrostatic charges, so the above-mentioned Tivo drives are not saved from degaussing by metal shielding. There is a related phenomenon for magnetism called the Meissner effect which has only been demonstrated in superconductors.