A man and his cable collection!

The age old problem of not wanting to throw away a cable in case it might be useful later.

Even those who are not techie will be guilty of at least a small collection of power adapters from old devices and mobile phones, spare usb and hdmi cables etc..

Are you guilty of this? And does your wife or partner understand? Or keep moaning that you need to throw them away!

This is far more of an issue for us retro collectors. Manufacturers liked to make all the cables for their consoles proprietary and unique for each and every console they made. Every Nintendo system had a different controller connector and power cable, although they did share AV ports for a couple of generations.

I recently tackled my huge box of cables that was an impressive tangled mess. I ended up needing to buy 10 clear plastic storage boxes with clip on lids to sort them into useful separate types. HDMI, speaker wire, audio cables, power leads, power adapters, older AV cables (SVideo, Composite, Component etc)..

But this doesn't include my actual console collection. I also bought more of the small clear storage boxes and have sorted my consoles collection so each system now has its own box with all it's accessories in. Controllers, AV cables, memory cards etc. For the first time ever I'm actually getting to the point where it's all sorted, tidy and I can instantly find exactly what I need. It has taken ages, but finally it's not just a couple of removal boxes full to the top with a massive jumble of cables and other stuff.

This has left me with quite a few cables and connectors I have no idea what to do with, but don't just want to throw them away. Things like USB to Serial cables. What will I ever need or use those for? And IDE ribbon cables. I actually do need those at this moment because I'm going to be going through all the HDDs in my old PCs and seeing what's on all the drives I've had in storage. So that actually is a big argument for why we hold on to old cables. There is a reason!

I have however just binned every phone line cable and RT TV aerial cable I had. I've not used a TV aerial for over 10 years. We still have 2 of them on the roof but they are not connected to anything. It all goes through the internet now, And the same with the phone. Full fibre, so no need for phone line cables. Some cables do just become completely obsolete to the point where they actually have no purpose.