Since 1986, the WeirdStuff Warehouse has been a place where, it seemed, you could find any computer, gadget, software, or related accessory ever manufactured if you just spent enough time scouring its aisles. (I swear there’s an Apple-1 in there somewhere.) Sadly, the vast salvage shop–located near Yahoo in Sunnyvale–is closing on Sunday, robbing Silicon Valley of a treasure I can’t imagine existing anywhere else. I paid my respects during one last visit today and saw, among countless other wonders:
- VCR Plus, the handy-dandy remote control that let you program your VCR by punching in codes
- Both Web TV and Web Pal, two different ways people browsed the internet on their TVs in the 1990s
- Some copies of Windows Vista that were among the few things in the place under lock and key
- An unopened Columbia House Kris Kristofferson album on eight-track
- An iMac whose LCD was missing, revealing the circuitry and hard drive once hidden behind the screen
- A networking switch from a company called Blonder Tongue, which has been around since 1950 and was indeed founded by a Mr. Blonder and Mr. Tongue
- An incredible selection of obsolete storage devices and media–Zip, Jaz, SyQuest, and on and on
- All the stuff you’d expect to find in a store like this, from typewriters to Power Macs to every cable ever used to connect anything to something else
