A crazy person collected 14,000 computer keyboards.
Not me, not me. I'm not that crazy. Years ago when my kids were little and I was their primary care giver, I learned that I could make them very happy on a Friday by taking them "yard sailing," and letting each of them spend a dollar or two on whatever they wanted to buy and bring home. We did this so consistently, that I often bumped into some of the serious collectors of things in the area, who kept asking me, "What do you collect?"
Eventually I decided to collect something I felt was interesting, with historical significance, and that might end up being an investment toward my retirement. My personal collection of slide rules now numbers 223. Stan Flouride, however, the "crazy person" referred to in the title, collected 14,000 computer keyboards. Why? Well, you can either Google him and find out that way, or read on, and I'll tell you what he did with those keyboards.
I wrote recently about a book in which one narrative subplot was the digitization of the entire British museum and library, and then storage of basically all of the world's knowledge, culture, and history on a single chip. That chip was generated, fictionally, in 2025 and had a capacity of 128 petabytes. Gantz calculates that in 2006, humans generated 161 exabytes (164,864 petabytes) of digital data....
