• San Jose Mercury News, Thursday, April 8, 2010 10:44 AM

Mike Cassidy reports on a 30,000-square-foot cavern in Silicon Valley called the Weird Stuff Warehouse that sounds like a wetware dream for techno-nerds. The surplus store is "packed with a staggering array of gizmos conjuring up memories of the dawn of the PC, the time before broadband and the dot-com glory days," he writes.

It actually sounds like a typical American basement, multiplied by a factor of many thousand square feet: Shelves filled with boxes of cables -- USB, Serial ATA, Firewire, audio, video -- "spilling out like serpents in an 'Indiana Jones' movie." And car chargers, cell phones the size of a brick, modems and, if you still have to file your taxes, Turbo Tax software for 1994.

"I think it's fascinating, because it is sort of a history of Silicon Valley, where you can go in and walk around and find stuff and even buy it at very low prices," says Harry McCracken, the former editor-in-chief of PC World.

Read the whole story at San Jose Mercury News »