I found out from my brother that it was valuable.

My Beatles lunchbox, probably too beat up to be worth anything.

from the 60s and 70s

He had a lot of sports cards from the early 60s that his mother tossed, although dad freely admits that quite a few cards wound up in the spokes of his bicycle tires before the collection went to the landfill.

I did the same with some of mine, as well...but only the lesser duplicates I had acquired.

Put old baseball cards on the wheels of our bike to make a cool sound. I have proberly spent millions on making a motor sound.

I didn't see yours until after I posted something similar to the person above you.

I gave a huge box of early cards to some kids who were starting to play back around 1999. They decided it was too complicated and traded them for Yugioh cards. Shortly thereafter I looked up the value of some of them and realized what I had done.

Literally thousands (not even vaguely exaggerating here) of dollars worth of cards just wasted.

Never really liked the game or played it myself, but it was some interesting days trying to get any cards to sell. We scrambled for weeks to get restocks of alpha and beta card series.

to our local shops because allocations would come in without warning and if you didn’t get there first you were screwed. People were playing with stacks of Arabian Nights because nothing else was available for purchase.

I was actually cooperating with another local comic shop and we were on the phones working with our different suppliers. Whenever we found some we would let each other know and share the very limited wealth of knowledge. Neither he nor I would adjust prices above the stated retail, but we did have to limit sales to spread them out as much as we could.

I had a big collection of WW2 in 6mm and an extensive 25mm colonial era collection, but I gave it away rather than see something happen to it in the midst of a rather unpleasant divorce.

It was a Smith Corona Sterling that was my mom's from, I think, the mid or late 60's. It was a bluish green and was a really pretty typewriter. Yeah, that was a mistake.

The were the best-dressed Barbies of anyone else I knew. For years my grands would sew them beautiful gowns and dresses. I didn't throw them away but someone did because when I searched for them before my dad sold the house the were gone. I'm still upset.

And then resold it all to some woman in Iowa. It took me years to collect all that and I did have a few of my own dolls and clothing.

She knitted and crocheted them!

And she showed me how to make hats for them by soaking felt in water and shaping the felt over an empty thread spool. Then we'd decorate them with flowers and ribbons.

my mother said they cost more than my clothes (she thrift-shopped) so she handed me my grandmother's old Singer portable and a pattern and that's how I learned to sew -- I'm so grateful! I still have the machine -- it must be close to 100 years old.

Designed and sewed cheering outfits in high school and my early career was in costume design. Thanks Barbie!

She was an excellent seamstress.

that I dug out of trash dumps behind abandoned houses that dated to before the civil war. A double barrel damascus rifled shotgun I found in a falling down cabin in some Pennsylvania woods.

there are too many items to list that I tossed, however I do have a "Billy the Big Mouth Bass" in the original box, unopened, that I would part with for the right price.....

My Beatles trading cards, stuffed Hanna Barabars cartoon characters, Mouse Trap board game and Tonka trucks.

My brother later sold it for twice that.

A few years ago I drove a friend's old Mustang and was shocked how awful it was, like driving an old truck. I didn't remember it that way.

Modern cars with their highly engineered computer assisted design suspensions are far superior.

I don't remember mine being that bad but I'm sure it was.

I know there are some of those models remaining today that function, but I wonder of the small number of them still hanging around what percentage of them continue to operate without issues?

Both still work perfectly! We have a blast playing them with our kids.

The disk drives have a few common failures but they are usually easy repairs, not like modern throw-away electronics. I have one drive I upgraded in the 'eighties that doesn't work because the eprom in the upgrade kit has failed.

But I rarely unpack any of the physical hardware these day because I can emulate everything on my desktop computer.

I've got all the computers I owned, and most of the computers I used at school or work, emulated on my desktop computer. I have files going back to the 'seventies.

I was never a Commodore person. The Commodore retro community is huge and it's easy to find information about restoring the machines. It's almost a competition to see who can get the Commodore in the worst shape running again. I've seen blogs of people restoring Commodores pulled out of flood wreckage.

I keep coming back here

My first computer had some terrific games.

I sold my Hammond B-3 with the Leslie speaker.

Cape Dory Typhoon sailboat, (18-feet, slept two, great for camping out).

It was about 4-feet tall and inside were two speaker cones facing in opposition and mounted on a vertical axle. You could control whether speaker cones rotated and the rate of rotation. I think the amplifier was 100 watts but it was loud!

The combination of the Hammond and the speaker was a bear, however. They weighed a ton and took up much too much room. I have a large collection of keyboards and at one point, my ex-wife forced me to get rid of some of my stuff. I guess I took her suggestion to heart! (wink)

out, they were in a box in the closet and some guy came by asking if I had albums and I just sold them.

My Cheech and Chong album Big Bambu - the giant rolling paper was in pristine condition - lol!

I am one of those moms that did not throw her kids toys out. They are 28 and 26, still have all their beanie babies, pokemon cards, polly pockets, legos etc.

My husband and I were just talking about how people don't really collect any more. Back in the day, if you wanted to collect baseball cards I think you got them with gum, maybe 5 cards? Now you can buy the whole year of cards - my SIL buys them for my son - he has probably ten full sets, unopened and not much use for them.

We were moving - I said, "Whatever you do, don't throw these out." When I got home from work that day, what were the only thilngs thrown out?

There was a stone tool with a sharp edge that had been shaped to fit the hand so perfectly - I could hold it, and it was like I was communicating across the millennia with whoever had shaped and worked with it.

As a kid, of course, I thought it was a war implement, and saw epic cave-man battles with my tool used to bludgeon other cave-man's brains out. But actually, I think it was used for more prosaic applications.

Sorry.

of cavemen performing trepanation. There were three people holding a fourth down and "operating". It impressed me every time I went to the museum. The thing is, it was off in a corner, neglected. As the years went by it became covered in cobwebs. The last time I was there it was gone.

To this day I am fascinated by the fact that trepanation is a procedure that is tens of thousands of years old. Your stone age implements could have been used for brain surgery!

Not that I have a spouse, but if I did and he threw out anything in my collection of cool things, he'd be out the door in an instant. And, fossils and artifacts are highlights of my current collection. Not that I have anything THAT cool.

That in retrospect was very stupid of me.
Door number 1 or door number 2

I generally pick the zonk

Threw out my original Barbie doll and my old Mad Magazines from the 60s.

My hubby always talks about how he wish he'd kept his '63 Chevy Super Sport.

my son's Furbie.

Somewhere.

As to what I threw out?

1980's Marvel comics.
Including the X-Men "Dark Phoenix" saga.

Collection of wooden boxes from India.

I've done that with a couple of things I tossed and later regretted doing so. You can easily replace such things. More difficult to replace are relationships you ended, and later regretted doing so.

I also moved a lot, and I didn't realize when I was very young that before long surnames would be lost, then even first names. Address books are lost. And later I knew that but didn't "collect" them, even did my address books in pencil because it's normal for people to pass out of our lives.

I didn't know that someday if I only had their names I could not only be reminded of people I once knew but actually go say, hi, remember me, how are you. Or just satisfy curiosity about those I really don't want to know again.

I instead will always just wonder when and if reminded about people I once knew. Bad memory stinks.

People are paying silly money for those scratchy old things. I did sell my vinyl Styx Paradise Theater album for $20.

The computer works, the floppy drives don't.

My Dad used that computer for years past the time he could get replacements. Seriously, I have it and the TI-99 that Dad bought for Mom that is still in the box. Mom didn't want a computer so she never used it.

Never regretted giving anything away.

My parents trashed them all when I went away to college

Dungeon magazine as well (but didn't want to headline with that one for anyone unfamiliar...)

from the 60s.

a 1955 Chevy Bel Air, black and white like a saddle shoe. Man, I wish I still had it!

Two tone light-blue and white.

It might still be on the road. I sold it to a friend who sold it to a mechanic who restored it. I saw it a few years later and it looked and ran great.

It had been painted bright yellow and was jacked up in the back. I killed it by not putting fluids into it . The engine just froze up, so it was sold.

I foolishly brought it to college with me and ended up carrying paraphernalia all over campus with it. It was either lost or stolen during those foggy times.

That and my boyhood baseball card collection, which was stored in a miniature locker box from TOPPS. I used to get the paper and if any players from any teams were traded or re-signed, I would religiously move his card to his new team. Mickey Mantle was in there somewhere, among others. And by others, I mean thousands of others.

I think my mother cleaned out my closet and had no idea that one day I could've actually covered a lot of my college costs had I sold those cards for value.

While I was at college my mother cleaned out my closet. She threw out all my MAD magazines. I had every issue from August 1956 - June 1964.

tons of cards from the 1950s. I probably could have retired off the value of that collection.........