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Thinking about all the unique and different peripherals I've owned over the years, from ISA capture cards, to parallel port controlled shutter glasses for 3d games. I've seen many many accessory or computer peripherals come and go. The nostalgia of these things is a lot of fun.

I tried to find some sort of historical time-line or list but what mostly turned up is computers themselves.

I'm more interested in the mice, scanners, the weird adapters that shouldn't exist, short run very rare products, strange devices from computer shows in the 80's and 90's... Hardware you might find in a geeks basement that would be completely useless now, but was the coolest thing around when it was new. An example would be a drawing tablet I had for my TI-99 computer, or the audio tape player accessory for a C64 which let you save files to audio tapes, An ISA card that did the same for PC's hooked up to a VCR. Remember that IBM-PC Jr upgrade kit, that added a floppy drive, more memory and the AT switch in the back?

I'd love to find either a wiki, or a list that has already been assembled which contain many of these weird (or common) accessories.

I've had so many over the years I suppose I could start a wiki here if such a list doesn't already exist.

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  • Ah, I remember many days of storing programs to cassette tapes. Good days... :)
    – BBlake
    May 19, 2010 at 16:30
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    Computer History Museum - computerhistory.org SO, LLC has dedicated a brick there as well blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/…
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    May 19, 2010 at 17:52
  • This museum declines things like "I/O Devices: Keyboards, Mice, MODEMs, Monitors" That essentially means it's going to be missing many of the things I'm actually interested in. They probably decline these types of things since there are so many different types and it would be difficult to store / display much of these.
    – zimmer62
    May 21, 2010 at 19:49

2 Answers 2

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Jim's Computer Garage (museum)

http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/j-hist.shtml

Remarks

While the original link is no longer accessible, the last snapshot dated 21 Dec 2009 can still be accessed on Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

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    :( sadly the link is down
    – Hastur
    Nov 12, 2015 at 11:05
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More sources :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing

http://www.oldcomputers.net/

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