7 Collections of Unusual Tech Collections

Collect mouse balls? Windows stickers? Heat sinks? Why not?
7 Collections of Unusual Tech Collections

While composing our recent adventures with vintage computer and video game collections, I ran across a number of unorthodox accumulations of tech parts that you don't usually see together in one place. I'm talking things like stickers, peripheral components, game cartridges, and more.

And it struck me while looking at them that while some people purposely collect things as a hobby—like, say, stamps, and coins—others collect whatever they happen to run across frequently. For example, I collect faux promotional credit cards that were mailed to me by the dozens back in the early 2000s (times were heady, man) because I thought it was absurd, and also product labels from old gadgets that I have had to recycle.

It is that category into which we are about to descend—plus a couple neat exceptions. So fasten your collection pod seatbelts and prepare to see some weird and neat stuff in the slides ahead.

  • Mouse Balls

    1 Mouse Balls

    It's not every day that you see a 16-layer tetrahedron composed of mouse balls—you know, the rubber-coated metal spheres that used to lurk inside every computer mouse before they all went optical. French engineer Paul Courbis assembled this pyramid (complete with all-seeing eye motif) out of 1,496 rubberized balls back in 2006 when he had access to a large number of them.

    I'm not privy to many French idioms, but the Google translation of the original French blog post about the pyramid includes a doozy: "It must weigh as much as a dead donkey!" With your help, we can launch a new trend in which the commenter compares the weight of tech objects to dead animals.

    (Photo: Paul Courbis)
  • AOL CDs

    2 AOL CDs

    Back in the 1990s and early 2000s when AOL mailed out bajillions of floppy disks—and then CD-ROMs—containing AOL client software, a few people (such as myself) collected as many as they could find. While I boast a rather large AOL disc collection myself, I have never plastered my wall with them, as this person apparently did back in 2006. Why? Because they take up a too much disc space. Get it? No? Okay, moving on.

    (Photo: Monkerino Hill)
  • CPU Heat Sinks

    3 CPU Heat Sinks

    When you're running a screaming beast of a computing machine, all the heat you generate has gotta go somewhere. That's where heat sinks come in, drawing thermal energy out of silicon chips and dumping it into the atmosphere with the help of tiny electronic fans.

    Photographer Lizzie Fox spotted this impressive collection of aesthetically pleasing computer sinks at the Santa Cruz County Fair in 2013. Judging by the ribbons, this collection won first place. Whether that was first place in the whole county fair (beating the county's largest pumpkin), or just the Juniors Thermodynamics section, I do not know.

    (Photo: Lizzie Fox)
  • Windows Branding Stickers

    4 Windows Branding Stickers

    Whenever I see a weird sticker, I think, "Somewhere in the world, there is a factory churning these out by the thousands, and it probably looks hilarious." If you wanted a sneak peek into factory that makes Windows branding stickers—you know, those badges that come stuck to new PC cases touting Windows within—then this may be as close as you can get.

    Our hypothetical peek comes courtesy of a computer recycling center in Portland, Oregon called Free Geek. As they repurpose used PCs with Ubuntu OS, workers peel of the machine's Windows sticker and put it on the wall. They should stick them to a window for extra irony.

    (Photo: Jeff Kubina)
  • Jurassic Park Super NES Cartridges

    5 Jurassic Park Super NES Cartridges

    You're looking at around 300 copies of Jurassic Park for the Super NES packed into a refrigerator. Yep, that's weird. Maverick collector Kevin Hershberger of Fort Wayne, Indiana began collecting the cartridges on a lark when he ran across over 100 copies of the game for sale in the inventory of a going-out-of-business video game store. Soon he began trading to get more from friends online. When he reached the maximum amount of Jurassic Park Cartridges that he could fit into any given square meter of space (called Avagadro's Number, I think), he put the whole thing on eBay for $1,500. It later sold for an undisclosed offer amount...that was probably not $1,500.

    (Photos: Kevin Hershberger)
  • Copy Protection Dongles

    6 Copy Protection Dongles

    Author and research tutor Dr. Dan Lockton found this unholy jumble of copy protection dongles (and port backplates) in a dumpster at Brunel University in Englefield Green, Surrey, England. Application developers designed the dongles to act as hardware keys for expensive software programs such as design tools and audio workstations.

    Upon running a particularly expensive application, the software checked to see if a key was present on the machine's parallel port before working properly. Today, some software packages still use similar physical dongles through USB ports, but for the most part they have been replaced by Internet-based copy-protection methods. Progress, but not really.

    (Photo: Dan Lockton)
  • Central Processing Units

    7 Central Processing Units

    Admittedly, this impressive collection of CPUs is the least unusual collection of the bunch—but it is still uncommon. I too have a collection of microprocessor chips that I have pulled from space machines over the years, but it's nowhere near as large as this assemblage arranged by Gilbert Smith, who moderates the appropriately titled cpuporn subreddit (safe for work, unless you work at an Amish quilt factory).

    Among the usual Pentiums, highlights of the collection include an AMD 286 engineering sample, a DEC Alpha, and a Transmeta Crusoe chip. Other highlights: Getting to see so much raw computer brainpower spread out over a tabletop.

    (Photo: Gilbert Smith)