You never know when you'll need a FireWire 400 cable or a charger cable for a handspring treo, I guess...

I think I've cleaned up my box of cables twice in the past and, inevitably, _the very next day_ I did so, I needed one of the cables I had gotten rid of. Never again.

I prefer getting rid of old devices that needing to store old cables ad-infinitum.

I see those boxes at estate sales regularly. And on FB marketplace for free or $5. Or sometimes somebody thinks they're sitting on a gold mine of technological history and tries to ask actual money for a box of 20 year old tangles.

Sometimes hoarding stuff pays off. It's usually just hoarding.

I organize mine into roughly three boxes by how common they are.

One for every-day cables (like USB C), one for the stranger cables (like USB-B 3), and one for the one-offs (like a Nintendo DS cable).

It's the easiest to actually keep organized and it's easy to find what I need.

The proper Latin term for someone throwing away your big box of cables is cabula rasa.

Box. Amateur. Talk to me when you have a filing cabinet full of cables with bags labelled “SCSI”, “IEE-488 (Commodore)” and “DIN”.

At least my past self was good enough to bag and label.

Every now and then I look through the cables and take out the ones I no longer have hardware for. We have a cargo-tram every couple of months where you can bring things for disposal that don't go to normal garbage or recycling. Supposedly they recycle the cables but I suspect that means incinerating them (to generate electricity) and collecting the metal after.

I'm a cable hoarder. I have cables for technologies that have been dead, for decades.

I need help.

I 3D print cable rocks and mount them in my garage and then hang them in groups by type. I also get rid of every cable type I haven't used in 10 years because you can always just buy more of that cable.