Since I'm now retired, I've resigned myself to accepting the reality that I'll never actually find a use for any of the 486 motherboards that have multiplied on my storage shelves over the years . . . or the mountains of zip drives, AT power supplies, 10base2 coaxial network cards, 24K modems, memory modules in a dozen bygone form factors, and so on.

It's taken me the better part of a month, but I've finally cleaned out three decades of stuff and hauled about 150 cubic feet of now-useless technology to the local e-waste depository.

One thing I couldn't part with, though, was my first PC, a genuine IBM 5150, plus a box of spare parts for it. (Okay, I kept my Commodore 64, too, but that wasn't actually a PC-class computer.) That 5150 is a collector's item -- and was the source for a lot of memories.

I hauled the IBM out of storage, hooked everything up, turned on the power, and . . .

PARITY CHECK 1
2040 201

Drat.

I grabbed a screwdriver, some extra chips from the spare parts box, and proceeded to troubleshoot. In 10 minutes I had it up and running again -- and all without referring to any notes or reference books.

For those of you too young to remember when memory consisted of discrete chips on the motherboard:

• IBM POST code 201 means POST encountered a memory error;
• 2xxx means the bad memory chip is in Bank 2;
• xx40, when converted to binary, is 01000000,
  so the bad chip is the 2nd of the 8 chips in that bank.

I replaced the 4164 chip in the 2nd socket of Bank 2 with one from my spare parts box.

Now, I don't know whether to be impressed that I remembered how to do that, or to be depressed at how much useless and obsolete knowledge must be clogging up my brain.

Maybe there should be a way to do a Spring Cleaning of the mind.