Doing what I do, I always am looking for good spare parts. When I get an old computer, I generally tear the thing open, salvage, sort, and store what I can use or need to have spares of, and then recycle the rest. Last week, I co-worker gave me an old Pentium II 333mhz box. It was a small HP mATX case, just big enough for the tiny motherboard, power supply, hard drive, CD, and floppy. Before giving it to me, he said that he thought that the CD drive might be dead, but his “geek friend” had repaired the floppy drive recently. He didn’t say what he did to “repair” it, but since the floppy drive itself looked really old, I was guessing that the cable itself was the issue.
So I ripped open the small little box, and all I saw was ribbon cable. It litteraly was popping out of the case when I opened it. But it was too narrow to be a hard drive cable. Upon digging through it to find connectors on the thing and unplugging it, I pulled out this monstrosity:
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the longest floppy cable I’ve ever seen (that’s a 15-inch ruler in the screen, for reference). It supports three 3.5″ or 5.25″ floppy drives (yes, the big 5.25-inch actually floppy floppies). All told, the thing stretched out to 45-inches. It probably exceeded the recommended length for those cables, but I don’t know for sure.
Now I know HP would’ve never have put a cable that long in their system (I would hope), so my only guess is the “geek friend” replaced the original cable, which was bad, with whatever he could find. And then crammed it in there. I’m honestly amazed the system had any airflow at all, as this thing took up most of the free space in side the system. But the RAM and CPU I parted out of it are now powering a Smoothwall box, so it was worth the digging. The floppy drive cable is getting kept just for fun.