Did you guess each item’s identity? Here are the answers to our dying technology trivia quiz:
Item 1 is a CD-ROM audio cable. Back in the day, to listen to a music CD on your computer, this cable connected the audio channel in the CD-ROM directly to the computer motherboard. Over the past 15 years, the cable was replaced with a software solution, the CD-ROM was replaced with a DVD-ROM, and finally, the music CD was replaced by streaming services and audio files.
Replaced long ago by a SATA connector, 15+ years ago, a single IDE cable was used to connect two devices to the motherboard. Either two IDE hard disks, two CD-ROMs or one of each were connected on a single cable. Most motherboards could use two cables to connect a total of four devices. SATA connectors (the thin red cable in most computers now) are much more user-friendly.
Around 2004, a lot of motherboards had something called a Northbridge controller. The small black chip had to be cooled, and a fan was installed on top of it to do just that. The fan failed on some computers, and a heatsink could be installed as a replacement that used less power and made less noise. The Northbridge controller has been integrated into the overall system, and no trace of it exists.
When I was in high school and university, my computers had 3.5″ floppy drives to transfer and backup files. Files were much smaller back then since a floppy disk had a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB. The next step up from floppies circa 1997-1999 was a ZIP drive with a size of 100 MB. It was more expensive, but it made storing data so much simpler. Jazz drives also existed and could contain even more data. Both eventually disappeared in favour of larger hard disks, USB keys and the cloud.
It was fun to find these relics, but technology has moved on, and computer repairs are a lot simpler to do now, thankfully.