Strangest items found on a used Mac

...interested in selling that PPC 601/100?

Or perhaps you may be interested in selling the G3 that you got at a thrift store?

I've got a Mac SE that was once a workstaion for the Knasas Geological Survey. It's got reports of stuff that I have very littel clue about. Mineralogical studies, and all sorts of techiinical reports. I also found a 7100/66 that was part of an architectural firm, they make bid reports etc. on it. THen there was that IBM box I got, that came from Farmland Corp. before they got taken over by ADM. It ran a copy of Win95*c*. Odd.

I got a 300MHz Beige G3 that was from Publisher's Clearinghouse. It still had employee information and sales reports.. I did the scrupulous thing and deleted it all.

doug-doug the mighty:

You're a few years too late. I donated that one to a library in Philadelphia if memory serves me correctly, along with a few other Macs.

My dad picked up a Color Classic for me from a university surplus, and besides simple stuff like resumes it also had a will and previous user's bank and investment account numbers...

1) Two ex-GIO Bank Pentium 133/166s, contained IBM OS/2 Warp and thousands of confidential records etc in a proprietary Filemaker-type program. Interesting.

2)(and the coolest) LC 630, ex-rental, obviously belonged to either a teacher or a parent(few creative writing assignments in ClarisWorks). In Note Pad, the owner had typed up a few notes on new Mac models they were considering- a Performa 5300/100 or a 5400/120. Justification on getting the 5300? "Only very slightly slower, a bit cheaper."

Bet he/she really regretted that decision.

At the end of 1993, I bought a IIfx that was previously owned by Douglas Adams. The full story is at:

http://www.mandrake.demon.co.uk/Apple/iifx.html

Phil

Once I found a mac. I think it was a beige G3 that was for the california association of avocado growers. All it had was some letters but fairly interesting.

Ditto on the geology files - from an ex university PBook 180.

But easily the strangest stuff I've found was a huge collection of high-quality scans of illuminated mediaeval manuscripts, and a small program the previous owner appeared to have written to teach students to read and pronounce Old or Middle English. From text and WP files, diaries, letters of introduction, it seems the owner was working on a thesis and had been granted permission to travel to museums and cathedrals in Europe and make original scans of some rare works.

I wouldn't normally read personal information on a machine (and I've since deleted it all) but once I found the scans, curiosity drive me on.

Thats funny macsrock

That is awsome. Douglas adams is my favorite SciFi/Comedy authors of all time.

In addition to weird things on a Mac, I have found weird things in a Mac.

I've found coins, keys, bits of paper and bits of fabric inside a Mac. Inside of PC's, I've found the same, except for one machine I got that was completely caked in dust and nicotine. Another machine I got was caked, and I mean caked in cooking grease. We're talking grease-caked fans, drives, etc. It was a mess.

A friend of mine, however, found the worst stuff in a PC. He got a PC given to him full of cockroaches. That's why I always open up new additions to my collection in the backyard before bringing it in the machine. Yuck!

Cheers,

The Czar

Well most of the macs I get are hand me downs from the college i work at so they don't have anything on them and if they do, we (I) wipe them out and reinstall the os.

However one thing we do at our university to ALL hard drives is run a DoD wipe program. A DoD program is a Department of Defense approved hard disk wipe program. We will actually run the program on all drives (mac drives included, we pull them out of the mac, and put into a pc). The program bascially wipes out the drive and keeps rewriting data so that you can't even do a foresnic restore of the drive. We do that program on all old drives from a 40 meg laptop drive all the way up to the newest drives that we are actually dumping.

Fascinating about Douglas Adams. Really cool.

I got a Graphite iMac in at work last week, that's in much the same condition. The plastic is almost completely yellow.

I call it the smoke grey model.

-BDub

I'm a technician. A lady brought in a Monitor and Keyboard with their cords cut. She wanted me to fix the cords so she can use them. She wasn't real specific on how they were cut. Granted this was back when keyboard and monitors where expensive. Anyways, I noticed brownish burgundy spots on the monitor case, and little white pieces all over the keyboard. She said she tried cleaning them off. I inquired further only to find out her Husband BLEW HIS BRAINS OUT IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER! Blood and skull fragments. Talking about repulsed!!! The insurance company cut the cords on the monitor and keyboard, and replaced them with new, but the lady wanted them fixed to use again. MY GOD!!! What was she thinking??? This story will stick with me till death do us part.

Weird yeah! I got weird in the bag MAN!!!

Now *that* is disturbing.

I wouldnt even touch it =/

Sheesh, jbhasman, if this were a pissing contest, I can't imagine (nor would I want to) someone beating that.

The story was disturbing... I would trade that story anyday for a warm and fuzzy mac story. The worse thing was I was touching the keyboard trying to figure out what the little pieces in between the keys were.

If anyone has invented a memory eraser please send me the plans today!

Yeah! Weird!!!

I tried the Magnet thing, but that didn't seem to work...

If someone brought a computer in to me that had little bits of skull and brains on it, i would burn the computer, then check my self into a Haz-Mat cleanup center! Somehow, the word "ick!" doesn't quite describe... I hope to god you didn't touh the thing after you found out waht had happened.

You guyz are so funny! =P

Umm...No! I touched it long before the truth was revealed. I think my faced turned 5 shades of white. I had here take it back, and went and washed my hands for 20 min or so. It was very hard to contain myself and ask her to go away nicely.

I feel so sorry for you. That is nasty.

When I bought my Powerbook 180 on eBay, I found a Hypercard stack of the Meyers-Briggs personality test. The previous owner apparently swapped in a hard disk from a Powerbook 540 that had the MB test, a bunch of other software (including a couple of hard-to-find battery utilities), and some old real estate sales records too.

I'd have kept the hard to find battery utilitys and trashed the rest.

When i got my 1997 G3 Minitower (and this was in 1997, and i bought it "New") i booted it up only to find a heavily fingerprinted musical instrument instructional CD-Rom.

Oh, I kept them all right.

OK jbhasman, you win - no contest

cool, do you still have it?

same question, do you still have it?

A friend got a Quadra 610 from a state surplus auction here in town and gave it to me. To my surprised it was from the Kansas Internal Revenue service and still had some documents on it! It also has a script for connecting to a one of there databases via FoxPro.

I was browsing through piles of junk at the local recycling center when I came across a SE with a Radius 68020 accelerator.

I got a SE/30 from a local nudist colony. It had their desktop publishing software loaded and several issues of there newsletter on the hard drive. And before anyone asks, no there were no pictures. What is note worthy of the SE/30 is that it came with a Radius video card to drive a second monitor at 1152 x 870 (fixed resolution).

Even though this isn't too weird, I got my Apple II off eBay with the fasitination of 16-bit computers in 2003. I heard a rattling inside, and ignored it. I turned it on, and a bunch of random trash was printed on the screen, and sparks flew from the ventlation cracks. I opened it to find:
a disk II card (it came with no disk drives) a ram extention, and to my suprize, the speaker inside had come un atached from the computer and and had a little toy car taped to the back of it. It had rolled around inside, and short circuited it. The car looked like those old batteries, when you leave them in too long, and I was afraid it was bad, so I threw it (the toy car, not the computer) out the window into a dumster. Never saw it, or the same model ever since. I'm now afraid it may have been rare. well anyway, I sold that one, and got another IIe. Bye.

Not to be picky, but an Apple II is an 8-bit class system.

Maybe he was refering to an Apple IIgs which is
a 16-bit system (although a very early generation
system). They are still around.

I can't mention the strangest things I've found on a mac without violating the Terms of use of this forum.

Oohhhhhh, now im curious!

That is only because you have never seen anything truly disgusting in your life.

curiousity lost

I bought some Mac clones and a few old PCI Macs from a guy who works for Disney in Orlando. I found him on Ebay through an auction he had and he is a maintenance worker in the park and bought a pallet full-o-Macs at an auction Disney had. He bought the pallet just for one 24x SCSI CD-ROM if that gives you any idea how much he paid for it. I bought about 10 computers for $90.00 and some still had original Illustrator eps and photoshop Disney art on the hard drives. Some pretty cool stuff......

I still have a 6100/66 DOS that has the Walt Disney "property of" sticker and lots of artwork and another SCSI drive full of stuff.

Hey,

I have a Mac 8500 from Industrial Light & Magic. Got George Lucas and ILM stickers on it. Nothing on the drives, though. Right now it's a server for researchers on "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis." I'm gonna have the producer and director sign it when they're done with it. But it's pretty much at the end of its movie career. Going from Star Wars to Jack Smith is pretty cool.

Among some surplus Macs from Disney in Orlando were a couple that booted up into a kiosk-style educational program that had been used in the Epcot theme park.

I've seen a variety of strange objects that were stuffed into the floppy disk slot. And paper clips seem to find their way inside StyleWriter printers.

I got a 4400/160 from an aunt who had got it from someone becaause the monitor had packed up (judging from the included monitor lead, it was a multiple scan 15, the cr*ppy ones).

When it booted up, it was running Mac OS 8.0, contained many graphic designer like programs (photoshop, illustrator etc.), drivers for some kind of plotter (and a mac plotter program, I forget the name). Also, to my suprise, there was a folder FULL of old mac games! They took up nearley half the HD! (the HD was 1.1GB). This was my first mac (had used my dad's Beige G3 and our old mac plus up until then) It also contained the Colour Stylewriter 1500 install disk in the floppy drive.

She also gave me a IIsi that she had got from Dorling Kindersly for £20 (with a monitor etc.) and she had used it for work (she now has an iMac) It ran Mac OS 7.5.3 contained quark 3.31, Word 5, lots of her work (burnt to a cd for her, then erased). It had the FPU upgrade, an 80MB! HD and a 10baseT/10base2 network card. Not perticulary strange, but interesting.

A friend once gave me a Performa 6200 that had beed used in Cambridge University's Chemisrty department (label on the top said "Repaired, Dept. Chemistry") and it contained many games, word 5, clarisworks 3, Mac os 7.5.3 and a chemistry drawing program (and some MIDI drivers for some reason).

Someone my dad knows gave me a PowerBook 520 that contained a book he'd written (and published) and a copy of Corel Wordperfect (quite good actually).

Half the fun of picking up an old mac is the pandora's box of files, things you'll find in it. Whether in configuration, loose crap, or items on the hard drive. I used to get abandoned machines from a shop I used to work for in Florida, and I'd find some of the craziest stuff on there. Once, I gave one of these machines to a friend to get him started with the mac, and neglected to see what was on it first. Sure enough, the computer had some "alternative" pornography (nothing illegal) that was set as the background, and the hard drive was chock full of images of the same ilk. It was quite possibly the most humbling moment I've had in a long time.

Ah, the joys of being an apple tech. At my current gig, I am supposed to check out what's on the computer's hard drives to make sure that the users aren't up to anything they shouldn't be, well in the event that there are suspicions.

- iantm

Ok, how's this? I just found a Word document on an SC40 from an LC. It's notes from a meeting between Ivan Milat and his lawyer/s in Long Bay remand centre.

Have you ever written a screenplay?

Not sure where you are, DrB, but here in the Colonies we gots the nearly unimpeachable attorney-client privilege, which even extends beyond death. Just a heads up thar... best to check your code (not that code, the legal code).

Hey,

Check the limitations in your reference:

The privilege may be waived if the confidential communications are disclosed to third parties.

It may be considered waived since the attorney should have had a reasonable expectation that the material on the discarded computer could be read by anyone retrieving it. If the lawyer had thrown the notes in the trash and they were found it is doubtful that privilege would still be in force.

It's certainly argueable.

William
www.williamahearn.com

Actually, that isn't correct. Good point, though, when someone makes a mistake like this, how can you stop publication? However, just because something is disposed of doesn't void this privilege and the client's rights. It just means the attorney can be sued for negligence.

Hey,

How can you prove negligence without breaking privilege? What would be the proof offered? I also think you're wrong. The lawyer may have studpidly made the material available to a third party but made it available he did. Privilege means the attorney cannot be compelled to testify or provide the police or anyone else with confidential information. If the police or a third party stole his computer that would violate privilege. But he threw it away and what went with it was any claims to confidentiality or privilege. It's not like finding someone's banking information and using it. That's still stealing because it involves an active participation in fraud. There's no overt act here besides collecting trash. The files were readily available to any reader. You can't claim violation of sanctity of letting the cat out of the bag if you throw the bag away with the cat still in it.

William
www.williamahearn.com

I found a dead wasp in a laptop was working on recently. How it got there, i have no idea. there's barely anyroom for it to get in that specific area. the thing was stuck the logic board (ewww...)