John McGaw wrote:
It has to be that these things are breeding. There used to be a joking
theory that wire coat hangers were reproducing and trying to take over
the world but it seems that computer cables are in the game now.

Do you find that your stock of cables is expanding without your
knowledge? I just looked in the closet in my "office" and found a bag of
unexplained USB cables -- mostly A to B types -- that really shouldn't
be there. I already had a rack on one wall holding cables and I swear
that there are twice as many now as there were a year ago -- all sorts
of cables, not just USB but video, power, extenders, and who knows what
else. I'm almost afraid to look in the downstairs "closet of computing
antiquity" for fear of what will be there now.

What does on do with such excess? Does dumping them at the recycling
center help?

Some day, those cables will be a relic and hard to find.

The trick, is deciding which relic "has legs", and which
doesn't. I have SCSI cables now, that I know are as dead
as the dodo bird. And those cables were expensive too.

I bought about $50 of SATA cables, so I'd have some
power and data ones, and I've pretty well put them
all inside computers now. It's the inside of the
computer cases, which is no longer pretty. But it
solves the "storage problem".

Molex Y cables, you keep those, because they still
come in handy from an ampacity point of view. They make
better "trees" than the SATA Y cables do.

I would probably toss the USB ones that don't have a
shield inside (those were used for keyboards, at 1.5Mbit/sec).

*******

I checked on my electronics recycler a few days ago, only
to discover the site has been bulldozed and a residential
community is going there instead. Now I'll have to find
another place to "drop my scraps". They love cables,
because they get their weight in copper from them.

Paul