Tucked neatly between Yahoo! headquarters and Lockheed Martin is a row of unmarked warehouses. To the common passerby, it's nothing more than an office park surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns. But to those who are in on the secret, there's a place full of technology treasures waiting to be unearthed. It's called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, and for more than 27 years it's been providing the Bay Area with a surplus of old and new technology. It's not just a Goodwill for antiquated hardware, though—it's also a step back through time. Inside this warehouse, it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern-day sound card and Windows 95 reigned supreme.
"There is a need for a place you can walk around and get parts and older technology—or even newer technology," said Chuck Schuetz, the man behind the Weird Stuff Warehouse. Schuetz runs the store with his brother and his colleague, Dave McDougall. He let Ars take a tour of the place and snap a few photos, so come take a walk through the warehouse with us to check out the "weird stuff." Welcome to where technology goes to retire.
-
A majority of the products in the Weird Stuff Warehouse come from local corporations. "We'll go to a company and set up a truck there and allow their employees to come out and leave their stuff," said Schuetz. The Warehouse receives about five to six pallets of products a day.
-
Business is going well right now for the warehouse, despite the quick-paced turnaround of the technology industry. "There have been high points and low points," said Schuetz. "What's driving the industry right now is [that] metals are up. The material you can't sell and gets turned back into metal has more value than it did before."
-
Schuetz explained that the store got its name from the phrase, "What's all this weird stuff?" Customers used to say this as they walked through the warehouse. "It was catchy, people remembered it," said Schuetz. "It was kind of a joke...You'd call someone in New York and get the receptionist laughing at you when you said who you were."
-
On where he got the inspiration to open the museum, Schuetz said he was working as an engineer at Shugart Associates when it was sold to Xerox. "I saw... they were downsizing," he said. "They were selling off tons of material so they could get down to a particular size. Some of the stuff I worked around, they were selling off for pennies on the dollar." He and another engineer then bought off the whole supply of things like hard disk controllers and began selling them through Byte magazine. "That got to be a big thing on the side." Eventually he teamed up with a scrap metal guy in the area and "that's what started the thing."
-
Since it's a difficult task to keep track of all the inventory that comes in, all of the products are categorized by the type, then by the company that made it.
-
For hard drives and various other components that come in, the crew at Weird Stuff tests them to make sure they still work. "We try to get the material in a position where someone would be interested in it again," said Schuetz of old components. "People do buy them for parts and fixing...A lot of our customers are people who specialize in specific areas."
-
The wall of printer cartridges.
-
The Weird Stuff warehouse features a range of hand-me-down server racks. Though newer ones would cost upwards of thousands of dollars, most of these start at $200. Schuetz mentioned that they usually sell to new startups in the area who want to get their business off the ground but are doing so with limited funding.
He also added that the warehouse sees "a lot of people who are doing repair work on the side...techies that fix things and make a little extra money. The hobbyist, experimenter, people that are retired—they made all their money, and they're fooling around now."
-
Among the barrels of "weird stuff," customers can find old treasures like LaserDiscs.
-
The Weird Stuff Warehouse sells the crosswalk signs after they're retired by the city. "After so many hours, they just replace them because they know they'd be problematic, so they sell them off," said Schuetz.
-
Take a walk down software memory lane with this boxed copy of Microsoft Office. There were also boxed copies of Dreamweaver and Autocad on a nearby shelf.
-
Sometimes the Weird Stuff Warehouse sells things that aren't necessarily tech-centric. Like these skis.
-
The Weird Stuff Warehouse used to be called the Computer Surplus Store when it first opened—and for good reason.
-
"We try to sell whatever we get, whatever is available. Because it's so diverse and because we've got our hands in all different areas, we've been able to last," said Schuetz. "When memory is the hot item, we have memory. When [server] racks are hot, we've got racks."
-
Some of the aisles of the Weird Stuff Warehouse feel like an archive of oft-forgotten technology.
-
Schuetz said he sometimes worries about the future of his business because of the way that technology is rapidly changing. "That's what I'm worried about.... because of tablets and smartphones and things. But it's always changing."
-
What happens to any material that can't be sold? The Warehouse destroys it. "We're a California collector of material, so we have to follow certain rules," said Schuetz. These drives will be sent off to be recycled for scrap metal. Later on, he added that "We deal with [recycling] companies that are the USA."
-
Any hard disk drives that can't be sold are destroyed so that the data contained on them cannot be accessed or duplicated.
reader comments
81