When I was a kid, I collected every broken or non-functional piece of small electronics I could get my hands on, and had a rather impressive box of everything from CD walkmans to TV remotes in hopes of building something cool with some of it one day. Well, 6 or 7 years later, my brother is doing some circuitry work, and I offer to get some nail polish to match his spray paint for a button or something that’s too small to spray-paint. Although I never found the nail polish, I did find the old box of parts, and he was thrilled to discover some of the goodies that were salvageable from some of those old broken things =P
Right now, I’m in a small-ish room in a small-ish apartment I share with three other students - there’s no room for hoarding here. Although, I suspect my impressive stuffed animal collection is still sitting in my parents’ closet, along with several hundred Beanie Babies my grandmother bought for us kids starting long before they were popular and ending long after they’d gone out of style...
Yes, well, the operative word was certainly not “small” and it certainly wasn’t “light”, either. In the 60’s I lived in northern NJ and used to take the bus or the Hudson Tube/PATH train into lower Manhattan to Radio Row, all of which was razed to build the WTC. I could spend all day there, there were dozens of surplus dealers and junk stores, and you could find literally any part you might want, so long as you were willing to spend the time to find it. It was paradise, for me. All the dealers there could gauge the expansion of a young lads’ eyes and quintuple the price if they saw the requisite amount of iris expansion.
We’re talking strictly tubes. The transistor stuff that was there was really primitive, and for the most part it had to mimic tube design or it wasn’t deemed credible as far as being a viable commercial product.
Many, many times I would buy some bedraggled 70 pound piece of pure crap and drag it home, and hopefully not slice the daylights out of my hands on the metal or the wiring. That was quite a task for a 12 year old.
“... along with several hundred Beanie Babies...”
Sitting at home? With your folks? And you off to college? You better send them an email RIGHT NOW and tell them not to get rid of any of that stuff.
For me it was my “Hot Wheels” collection.
For my father-in-law it was his baseball card collection!! (Babe Ruth, etc.)