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Think about the waste streams they were embedded in. Any typical household would probably not emit more than one unwanted computer a year, even into the 90s. So

Think about the waste streams they were embedded in. Any typical household would probably not emit more than one unwanted computer a year, even into the 90s. So you'd expect that the density of C64s or Atari 800s or whatever to be very low in the landfills. I.e. each one would likely be surrounded by a whole lot of utter crap, all of it moist and probably not pH neutral, and 30 years in that environment .. "it ain't gonna be pretty" OTOH, it was extremely common for people to discard them by yard sales, or give them to an nephew etc, donate them to others. Even ones put on the curb for the trash collection sometimes got scavenged. So a lot of these things had 2nd lives. Point of this being that over time there were instances of collectors who would amass piles of these things, and when such an individual decided to declutter, maybe, just maybe you'd find a whole lot of hardware buried together. But such concentrations would be the exception, and the state of preservation would still be abysmal. Personally, I think the time and effort would be better spent recreating new hardware per the old specs.

dylan604 4y ago
Still have my original Atari 2600 and NES system. There’s 2 items that never made it to a land fill
PopAlongKid 4y ago
> Any typical household would probably not emit more than one unwanted computer a year, Without trying to look it up, I suspect corporate desktop computers in the time period (IBM PC/XT/PS2, Compaq luggable, AT&T 6300) were a very significant part of the waste stream, and I think most of those just went directly to landfills, with only a few "2nd lives" when sold to employees.
- toast0 4y ago
  My high school got a large donation of corporate junked computers circa 1998 (was used for an after school technical program in computer repair), and I'm sure the corporations took a nice write off. Larger companies with enough computers to matter for this purpose likely have ways to get rid of capital equipment that aren't just throwing it away, and there's no reason computers wouldn't fit into that. For those computers that did end up in landfills, I imagine they wouldn't be very salvageable, there's lots of crushing processes that happen on the way to the landfill, and while most of the other trash will get crushed first, cause metal boxes are pretty sturdy, it doesn't take much to crack a motherboard and then it's not nearly as useful.

dylan604 4y ago

Still have my original Atari 2600 and NES system. There’s 2 items that never made it to a land fill

PopAlongKid 4y ago

> Any typical household would probably not emit more than one unwanted computer a year, Without trying to look it up, I suspect corporate desktop computers in the time period (IBM PC/XT/PS2, Compaq luggable, AT&T 6300) were a very significant part of the waste stream, and I think most of those just went directly to landfills, with only a few "2nd lives" when sold to employees.

toast0 4y ago
My high school got a large donation of corporate junked computers circa 1998 (was used for an after school technical program in computer repair), and I'm sure the corporations took a nice write off. Larger companies with enough computers to matter for this purpose likely have ways to get rid of capital equipment that aren't just throwing it away, and there's no reason computers wouldn't fit into that. For those computers that did end up in landfills, I imagine they wouldn't be very salvageable, there's lots of crushing processes that happen on the way to the landfill, and while most of the other trash will get crushed first, cause metal boxes are pretty sturdy, it doesn't take much to crack a motherboard and then it's not nearly as useful.