Today I did the kind of thing you only really have time to do on vacation — cleaned out the basement room and dragged two old monitors, one old CPU and an ancient scanner on down to the Computer Recycling Center in Santa Clara. It’s the third time I’ve had occasion to make this pilgrimage, and each time is eye-opening. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Valley, and traveling past those endless low-slung office parks with interchangeable names always leaves me in a kind of daze: The landscape is impenetrable. You just can’t tell from the outside whether any particular building harbors some amazing new technology on the verge of our lives — or just some dead-end venture-capital mistake.
While there are a lot more “space available” signs in the Valley today than two years ago, the pace of development remains intense. I drove down 237, which once was a quaint cut-over road through the South Bay wetlands and is now a mega-freeway racing past new malls and office complexes, and into the heart of Silicon Valley, past National Semiconductor and down a tiny side road, and there it was: in the back of a prefab warehouse, to the sound of a boombox blaring heavy metal, the folks at the CRC were heaping up mountains of old CPU boxes, stacks of monitors, dumpsters full of the Valley’s detritus. And I was hauling them my own little addition to the mounds.
So much money, energy and talent devoted to inventing, manufacturing and marketing the new stuff. And just one little ramshackle operation to deal with the discards.
Now would be a good time to re-read Jim Fisher’s definitive piece on “Poison PCs.”
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