This perfectly captures the universal “box of random cables” every parent somehow kept for decades.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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My Mom always throws out old cables like a week before I head over there and need that specific cable.
I'm not even a parent, and I got a crate of cables too.
I dig into my (organized) box of cables 2-3x a year. I still have functional older equipment that still sees occasional use.
Pro tip: go through the box and get rid of the duplicates of older items. No need to have 3 IDE ribbon cables, 4 SATA to 4-pin power adapters, or two parallel port cables.
+1 I only keep multiples of commonly used cables and I use ziplock bags to keep cables of the same type together in my cable box so it's easy to tell if I've accumulated too many.
Story time:
I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when I was given a white 1st gen iPod touch by a relative who was cleaning some junk out of the house. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn't completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise.
It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable. The weather outside was what the Irish, with their particular brand of sardonic humor, might describe as "a soft fine day", and what I would refer to instead as "a relentless bone-chilling mist". We had no plans that day.
So I found a computer shop, a tiny place in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I make the drive, tell the guy (who presumably owns and runs this tiny shop) what I'm looking for and he has no fucking clue. I couldn't really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB C standard at this point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous "lightning" cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, the wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack circa 2010.
The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on my quarry, a small white box containing "cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A" in trademark Apple white. It was the very last one. I forked over 8 euros for the thing, expressed my immense surprise and appreciation to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item and went back home with it.
I started charging up the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule -- chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.
My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I "spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech", but for me it's a very fond memory, and I'm serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy.
All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what might be the only tech shop in Connemara. He must have figured that someday, someone like me might need it!
One thing I learned after using computers for 34 years: As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it. I cannot see how that could be true for VGA and old centronics printer cables, but I shall not risk to find out.
Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.
Sure. But it is not like own the shit to plug my modern hardware to VGA.
You, next week, browsing eBay: an 8K dpl projector, in box, with mounting kit, $15, no bids, ending in 8 minutes?!
You, a few seconds later: WHY IS IT ONLY VGA WHAT THE FU-
I lost my BT earbuds 2 months ago, have a Type C phone, and just chucked out my ~5 Type C earbuds, because I had never used them since I got the Bluetooth one. I only left a pair of Jack earbuds. Guess where my Type C to Jack adapter went...
As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it.
This goes double for any cable that will be hard to get a new one of, so hold on to those centronics cables!
The moral of the story is: don't throw away your unusual old cables.
List them for sale on ebay.
Na, at that point through the device away.
This is where I keep my various lengths of wire
I have plenty of FireWire cables but I gave away all the computers that they plug into. Now I need a Lightning -> Thunderbolt -> FireWire 800 -> FireWire 400 -> iLink adapter chain and it would be cheaper to buy an old FireWire computer instead 🤦
I recently pulled a DVI to VGA RadioShack branded cable to connect a camera system to an old monitor. The dopamine of victory is worth it fellow cable hoarders.
What in the pfp is that?
I've been working in AV for the past five years. The amount of times I've needed DVI and VGA is astounding.
That might just bring me to orgasm.
Firewire was awesome, and so was thunderbolt. Do you like USB-C? Cause that’s how we got there.
Couldn’t agree more. FireWire’s Direct Memory Access was such a game changer for scrubbing video footage right from the camera.
There’s plenty of reasons to hate Apple but their I/O has always been outstanding.
Core Audio, for instance, is practically magic. Absurdly low latency with no need for device drivers with hardware that’s class compliant. Just plug it in over USB-C.
That’s fucking goddamn right
So was Thunderbolt? I thought it was still a thing?
It is still a thing. Many Laptops still have USB-C ports supporting Thunderbolt
FireWire mentioned
You seem knowledgeable on the subject, what the hell is 8 pin firewire? 400 has 6 pins, 800 has 9 and the small version for camcorders and stuff is 4.
Worth pointing out that, just as a chimpanzee may not be particularly knowledgeable on the matter of chimpanzees, and fascists are generally not very well-educated on the history of Fascism, asking a cable to explain itself to you may not lead to the outcome you desire (although this FireWire cable does seem to be capable of producing at least some level of output, and stringing two words together is indicative of a greater capacity for thought than, for instance, a fascist)
Sent this in a family group chat, referring to my dad. My kids found it funny because they claim it is me.
In some ways, we all become our fathers I guess, lol.
Especially when you bring time travel into the mix
I'm getting worried my din to PS2 keyboard adapter will never get used again
Cleaners broke the HDMI cable from the computer to the PC. Reached into my cable drawer and pulled out two good new ones. It was a very proud moment for me.
I never consented to this portrayal. Or it's distribution.
This cuts deep
I had a moment of validation almost identical to this and it was just as satisfying as you would imagine.
I've been working on this company for 3 years.
We have a "cable cabinet" that has around 50 different types of cables. Around 45 of them have been there from the early 90s. I still haven't used them. And none of my colleagues (some of which have been there for 20 years or more) have ever used them. Yet, everyone refuses to throw them away, we don't want to risk needing them and not finding them.
At my house I have about 35 lighting cables from old iPhones. I married into an Apple family with 4 daughters. Their friends think I got a cable for everything lol. Which I probably do
I have a box o' digital cables, a box o' analog cables, a box o' power cords, and a box o' power bricks.
The power cords and power bricks end up being useful once in a while.
As for the other boxes, I have never pulled anything but the most common cables, like standard USB or HDMI cables, out of there. You know, the ones that you can easily buy cheaply whenever you need them. I've been trying to convince myself to throw away those boxes for years.
I’ve been trying to convince myself to throw away those boxes for years.
As soon as the garbage truck hauls them off, you'll suddenly need one of them and have to go out and buy one.