[fatso83]

Why on earth would it not apply to programmers? We accumulate just as much cruft, if not much more, than the usual person. I have old 8086s, Atari's, tons of computer peripherals for ports I no longer have, etc. Most of it chucked away in some attic (somewhere). We gather stuff that obsoletes fast than anything, besides food. And we as a industry produce it too: I had a Nokia 3110 for close to a decade. Now my phones seldom last me two years.

[cyberferret]

I think it will depend on where you are at in the 'programmer' journey. For me, while it was still an exciting hobby decades ago, I used to collect PCs and consoles, keyboards and peripherals etc. just to tinker with them and experiment.

Then, as programming became more and more of a 'day job' and not a fun side project, I found myself getting rid of the clutter of obsolete equipment around the place. 35 years later, I am happy with just a basic iMac as my main development machine, and a Lenovo laptop as my Windows/backup development machine. That is it. No more multi screen setups or fancy keyboards & mice even - just stock standard stuff to get the job done so I can spend energy on my passion projects.

[dagw]

Sounds exactly like my journy. I used to 'pride' myself on having a *nix running on all the major CPU families (x86, PPC, Sparc, alpha and MIPS) sitting in my study. Now I just have a basic PC and a laptop.