Fitting a Square Peg in a Round World: Why I Collect Obsolete Connectors

My wife calls it the drawer of forgotten futures. I call it my archive. It’s the bottom drawer of my workbench, a solid oak slab from a flea market that has seen more action than my actual desk. Inside are meticulously labeled anti-static bags and plastic bins, each holding not microchips or CPUs, but connectors. Bizarre, outdated, wonderfully complicated ports and plugs that once promised to be the standard that ruled the world. To most, it’s junk. To me, it’s a quiet rebellion against planned obsolescence and a library of engineering dead ends.

I fell into this hobby sideways. A few years back, I was trying to resurrect an old SCSI scanner, a beige beast from the era when peripherals had heft. I needed a specific 50-pin Centronics cable, a thick ribbon of a thing that was nowhere to be found online. I eventually sourced one from a retired technician who sold me the cable, a dusty manual, and a lecture on why butom us connector quality has declined. That phrase stuck with me. It wasn’t just about the metal or the plastic. It was about the intention behind the connection – the expectation that this link would be made, and stay made, for the life of the machine. That started my hunt. I began seeking out not just the cables, but the stories of the standards that failed, the ports that lost the format wars, and the connectors that were simply too clever for their own good.

Modern computing is a study in consolidation. We have USB-C, a wonderful, capable, and frankly boring victor. It’s efficient. It’s logical. But it lacks personality. There’s no thrill in plugging in a USB-C cable. It goes in either way, it works, you move on. Compare that to the ritual of connecting an old Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connector to a Macintosh SE. The distinct, clunky shape. The soft but firm click. You were engaging with a physical system, a deliberate act. My collection is full of these physical negotiations. The S-Video connector with its delicate, offset pins that bent if you looked at them wrong. The PS/2 port’s satisfying, spring-loaded insertion for your keyboard. These were interfaces you had to learn, like a handshake.

The beauty is often in the failure. For every successful VGA or RCA jack, there are dozens of connectors that flopped spectacularly. I prize these the most.

The Aesthetic of Over-Engineering

Some connectors were marvels of mechanical design, solving problems that perhaps didn’t need such elaborate solutions. The D-shell connector, with its hefty screws and metal shield, feels military-grade. It communicates permanence. You wouldn’t unplug it on a whim. Modern HDMI feels flimsy in comparison, even though it carries exponentially more data. There’s a dissonance there between capability and physical presence that fascinates me. My drawer holds connectors that weigh more than entire modern tablets, tasked with moving a few kilobytes of serial data.

The Betamax of the Computer World

Then there are the losers of famous format wars. Everyone knows VHS beat Betamax. In my world, I collect the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) cables that lost to USB 2.0, and the SCSI terminators that lost to, well, simplicity. FireWire was technically superior for a time. It was peer-to-peer, faster in real-world use, and elegant. But it was more expensive. Holding a well-made FireWire 800 cable, you can feel the cost. The robust molding, the superior shielding. It’s a relic of a path not taken, a reminder that the best technology doesn’t always win. It’s a sobering lesson in commercial realities.

The One-Hit Wonders

Some connectors existed for a single product line or a brief moment. These are the true gems for a collector. I have a connector for an early 1990s dedicated graphics tablet that uses a proprietary pinout no one ever documented. I have the bizarre, multi-function port from a late-90s laptop that combined power, video, and Ethernet into one giant plug. These represent moments of wild experimentation by product teams, solutions born from unique constraints before the industry settled on uniformity. They are archaeological finds.

Why Preserve This Stuff?

People ask me this. It’s not for practical use, though I have helped a few museum restoration projects. It’s not an investment; this stuff is worthless on eBay. I do it for three main reasons. First, it’s a tangible history of interaction design. You can see how engineers thought users would behave. Second, it’s a brake on my own consumer impulses. Seeing a drawer full of ‘future-proof’ solutions that became obsolete in five years makes me skeptical of today’s marketing. Finally, there’s a simple, tactile joy in it. The click, the heft, the color of aged plastic.

The Hunt Is Half the Fun

You don’t find this stuff on Amazon. The hunt happens in dusty corners of electronics surplus stores, in the ‘miscellaneous cables’ box at ham radio flea markets, and in online forums where other oddballs gather. The community is small but dedicated. We trade tips on identifying unmarked connectors, share pinout diagrams we’ve reverse-engineered, and commiserate over the plastic fantastic trash of the modern era. The joy is in the discovery, the identification, and the cleaning. A rusted SCSI terminator restored with contact cleaner is a small victory.

What Makes a ‘Good’ Connector?

Through handling hundreds of these, I’ve formed my own opinions. A good connector has clear orientation. It should be hard to plug in wrong. It should have a positive, but not destructive, latching mechanism. The pins should be robust and well-spaced. The cable strain relief should be substantial. The materials should age gracefully, not become sticky or brittle. By these metrics, many modern connectors fail, prioritizing thinness and cost over longevity. I find myself judging new gadgets by their ports, often to my disappointment.

A Practical Implication for the Enthusiast

This hobby has a surprisingly useful side effect. When you understand why old connectors fail—corrosion, bent pins, cracked solder joints—you become much better at diagnosing and fixing modern gear. The principles are the same. A loose USB-C port on a phone suffers from the same issues as a loose game cartridge slot on a Nintendo: broken solder, worn contacts. My drawer of dead ends has made me a better troubleshooter for the living technology in my house.

So what’s in the collection? Here are a few current favorites, not the famous ones, but the oddities.

• The DIN-7 Mouse Connector: Used on Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics workstations. A chunky, circular plug that feels like it should connect a tractor, not a mouse.
• The Parallel Port D-Sub 25: Not the printer end, but the less common pass-through port found on some old ZIP drives and scanners. A monument to daisy-chaining nightmares.
• The Apple II Game Port: A simple DIP socket on the motherboard you’d plug a joystick card into. Not a cable, but the receptacle itself, representing a time when users were expected to open the case and install their own interfaces.
• The GPIB/IEEE-488 Connector: The chunky, 24-pin beast used to connect laboratory instruments. It screams ‘rack-mounted’ and ‘calibrated’.

In the end, this isn’t about nostalgia. I don’t wish for a return to configuring IRQ jumpers. It’s about appreciation. It’s about recognizing the design thinking, both good and bad, that got us here. Every time I slide open that oak drawer, I’m not looking at junk. I’m looking at a hundred different answers to the same simple question: “How do we connect this to that?” The answers are sometimes clumsy, sometimes brilliant, and always a snapshot of a moment in time. And that, to me, is worth preserving.