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Comment by buildsjets | Hacker News Reader

I swing by the local Goodwill clearance outlet occasionally looking for vintage electronics. The other day I grabbed a Commodore 1541 floppy drive from a bin. At the checkout, the young employee balked and said “sorry, that shouldn’t have made it out there, it’s against our policy to sell call computer drives because they might have personal info on them”. I asked him to please double check with the oldest, greyest employee in the store. I walked away with it for 3 bucks.

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There was a sweet spot in the mid to late 90s where you could find awesome ancient hardware at Goodwill. Around that time I lived in a town of about 150K people, so it had several Goodwill locations, but there was one where all of the computer equipment got sent. My last good score there was a PDP-11/7-something that was in perfect working order with a hard drive for something insane like $20, and the hard drive came complete with about 100 people's personal details *and* mental health records on it. And that's why they have that (very good) policy.

I know someone who scored a couple of very large VAXen from the prison service, and discovered they contained a lot - really a lot - of records of prisoner details that should absolutely not have made it out of the door.

Cue a couple of police and prison service cars rolling up outside his house and disgorging a lot of very beardy old sysadmins, who copied everything off onto modern media and wiped the drivers. They then offered the guy a contract to maintain the VAXen they still had, and help in the project to transfer stuff onto more modern databases.

Things became interesting when the guy got jailed for a few months for a minor incident that escalated a bit, but still needed to be given access to the prison service computers...

Edit: *drives

I don't understand why my Goodwills never have anything of the sort. The most "technical" thing I ever find are ancient overpriced wifi routers.

It's a numbers game. Keep checking

I found a great WiFi router at a thrift store, along with the original transformer brick, and it was in service at my home, unpwned, for about a decade until I could afford a brand new replacement.

3 bucks! Nice! Congrats on the find!

So the oldest, greyest employee disassembled the code and dumped the ROMs, and ran them through a steganography scanner then?

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