My Box of Cables Is Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

Jim Nielsen has written a defense of the Big Box of Cables, and I feel extremely seen.

The post starts with Tyler Gaw digging all the way to the bottom of his cable box and finding two cables he suddenly needed that had been sitting there for more than ten years. Jim was sufficiently inspired that he printed Tyler's post, taped it to the front of his own "FAMILY TECHNO BOX," and turned it into a warning for anyone in his house who might someday decide the contents look like junk.

I have had essentially the same box of cables for easily thirty years.

It has followed me through computers, houses, jobs, generations of connectors, and technologies that were absolutely going to make everything before them obsolete. Somewhere along the way I even started saving toilet paper and paper towel rolls so I could coil cables inside them, label the cardboard, and keep the whole thing somewhat organized. It sounds ridiculous until you need a particular cable from 2004 and can actually find it.

At that point the toilet paper roll becomes infrastructure.

There are obvious things in the box that get used all the time: USB cables, Ethernet cables, power cords, HDMI adapters, and the usual assortment of chargers. But the real value of the box is everything that doesn't get used all the time. Serial cables, old USB variants, audio adapters, VGA and DVI, strange power supplies, extension cables, gender changers, and little adapters whose purpose I sometimes have to stare at for a moment before remembering what they connected.

Most of those things have nearly zero resale value. Replacing one at the exact moment you need it can be surprisingly expensive, assuming you can still easily buy it at all.

That makes the economics of the cable box very different from the economics of ordinary clutter. A cable can sit untouched for fifteen years and justify its continued existence in a single afternoon.

It is really a compatibility archive

I think that is why I've never been able to bring myself to purge the box aggressively. It isn't just a collection of spare wires. It is a small physical history of the computers and electronics I've owned.

Computing has accumulated an enormous number of interfaces while pretending each new generation replaces the last one. USB was going to simplify everything, and then we got USB-A, USB-B, Mini-B, Micro-B, USB-C and several other wonderfully specific shapes hiding behind the same name. Video wandered through composite, S-Video, VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and plenty of adapters between them. Storage, networking, audio and power all have similar archaeological layers.

Eventually something old turns up: an old hard drive, a piece of radio equipment, a monitor, a printer, a game console, a computer someone wants files from, or some weird piece of hardware from a project twenty years ago.

Suddenly the obsolete cable isn't obsolete anymore. It is the one thing standing between you and a device that still works perfectly well.

My cable box is basically thirty years of backwards compatibility stored in cardboard.

There is probably an engineer somewhere who would tell me I should inventory all of it, photograph every connector, put it into labeled bins, and maintain a searchable database. That engineer is technically correct and will not be invited anywhere near my cable box.

The paper towel rolls are good enough.

They solve the biggest problem, which is keeping a cable from turning itself into a knot with every other cable while nobody is looking. I can write what it is on the outside, stand several together in the box, and reuse something that otherwise would have gone into recycling. It is cheap, obvious, and has worked for years.

I appreciate any organizational system whose bill of materials includes empty toilet paper rolls and a marker.

The attic is cheap storage

There is a reasonable limit to all of this. I am not suggesting everyone devote an entire bedroom to obsolete SCSI cables in anticipation of some glorious future need.

But a box in an attic, garage, or closet is incredibly cheap storage.

That matters when deciding whether something is actually clutter. There is a big difference between an object occupying valuable space in the middle of your house and an object quietly occupying one cubic foot in an attic for a decade.

The expected value doesn't have to be very high.

If the box saves one trip to the store, one overnight order, or one afternoon trying to figure out which obscure adapter connects some old device, it has probably paid rent for quite a while.

There is another reason I like keeping these things. Older technology becomes interesting again.

I have been spending more time lately looking at old computing systems, amateur radio equipment, hardware projects, and the physical history of computers. A cable that looked completely useless ten years ago may now be exactly what I need to connect something interesting to a modern machine.

The same instinct applies to screws, adapters, connectors, power supplies, little pieces of hardware, and the miscellaneous bits left over from projects. Most makers eventually develop some version of the junk drawer because experience teaches you that today's leftover part has a surprisingly good chance of becoming tomorrow's missing part.

Software engineers call that hoarding when it happens in a garage and caching when it happens in a computer.

I prefer caching.

Jim ends his post imagining his kids someday finding the box in the attic and hopefully respecting the warning taped to the outside. I like that image because there probably will be a point when someone looks at my own box and wonders why anybody needed this many different ways to connect two pieces of electronics together.

That person will be correct.

They should still keep the box.

Thirty years from now, somebody is going to need one of those cables.

Read Jim Nielsen's "Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables."