Great Thread (with pictures) of what this warehouse used to sell: https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome...
In the late 1990's they had a lot of "junk", which a couple of the employees curated into a museum of early computing. Then they moved buildings (from where vans autoparts is to the goodwill complex east of 35). The museum was formalized, but they also instituted some kind of "policy" that apparently went along the lines of "if its not in a black PC case put it in the recycling bin" and the guys running the dropoff/collection promptly "recycled" tons of rare stuff that in many cases could have been sold on ebay for 100x what they were making in the computer store itself (queue story of racing there to retrieve a high end 10 year old sun server only to be told it was in the bottom of a dumpster being shipped off to china/wherever to be "recycled").
So the store itself became worthless since it really only sold 3-4 year old PCs for frequently for more than what could be had on a good day at fry's. It stopped being a place to find parts for older machines, which made it effectively useless.
A couple years ago they closed down the computer museum too. I remember reading that they sent some of the documentation/etc to UT, some of the hardware to other museums and sold the rest of it on ebay or recycled it.
When I went to Computer Works, the guy at the register said to donate at the regular Goodwill next door. I was leery, but OK, it is their shop. I drove around the back, told the guy this was donations for the Computer Works and that everything was organized into groups -- hardware/software specific for a given machine was together. I started unloading my car into piles, and on the third or fourth trip I noticed that the receiving guy completely ignored me and had taken all the printed material and chucked it into a huge bin along with all the other random books and magazines they collected. I just about blew a gasket, but I promised my wife I would get rid of it.
I came back a few times in subsequent months, and it never showed up in the museum, and it never showed up on their "for sale" section. I assume it all got recycled.
You see, the Zip drive had a parked head. When the head came out to read the disk it would "click" as the head left it's dock and came out to the media. If it failed to read the media it would click again as it re-docked. This all happened fairly quickly and was the "click-click" sound you heard when a drive failed for almost any reason.
That proved to be a very difficult problem that ultimately led to the class action suit that I believe was the companies demise. It survived in name for a number of years, but really only in name.
The lawsuit itself didn't seem to affect the company that much but it affected policy a lot. Their next drive could have been the next big craze. It was ready way before compact flash came along but the company refused to ship it because the failure rate was slightly above 1%. We spent a few years trying to reduce the failure rate by fractions and we all know that a few years is ages is technology.