I have a graveyard upstairs in my attic. I know it’s not good to have an unauthorized burial ground on your property, but I do. There are many once beloved members of our household interred there. They are old electronics.

Most attics have such graveyards. You could fill the nation’s landfills with digital junk people still have. Most of it has no value. For some reason, many of us keep it all anyway.

When I say “most” of it has no value, I mean none of it does. I stopped using these things because three years after I got them, they became obsolete. I’m guessing another 5 to 10 years in the attic has made them more outmoded. Most people’s underwear lasts longer than their computer equipment. That’s the great thing about underwear; it doesn’t become obsolete. Well, if you’re a guy.

I went up to take a look at my graveyard. It was daunting because I have one of “those” attics. You know those old women with 107 cats who have to be carried out of houses so filled with debris the fire department can barely get through the door? Minus the cats, that’s my attic.

But I made it up there, and began to dig out some bodies. The first was an elaborate fax by Quasar. It looks like a decoding machine in the National Security Agency. That’s typical of the industry — instead of keeping it simple, they made a machine so complex no one could ever figure out how to use more than 10 percent of it. So of course I bought one.

If there’s a single feature I have in abundance, it’s storage. You know how programs today keep saying, “Do you wish to back up everything now?” But you’re scared if you say “yes,” it’ll take 45 minutes, and even then, it’ll put it all in some folder you’ll never find. Still, especially in earlier computer years, you were always reading stories about people losing all data, and ending up in mental institutions, so I began to buy backup devices.

I’m looking at one here called a Colorado T-1000 that has a big cassette I’m sure is filled with a year of data. The problem is how I’m supposed to plug the whole device into my computer, and make the data go the other way. Is there a non-geek alive who knows how to do that? Besides, the phrase “T-1000” is the name assigned by evil Skynet to the first Terminator in the movie series, and who would ever plug a terminator device into their current computer?

Next I found a Sharp Wizard. I remember this thing. It was like an early Palm Pilot, for calendar, address book and to-do list. But it’s the size of a paperback book. And the manual, which I see I still have, is about 300 pages. I think I bought this, opened the box, was scared to death by the manual, knew I would never carry around something that huge anyway, so stared at it on my desk until the warranty ran out, and took it right to the graveyard.

Half the pile is filled with a standard throwaway: printers. I’ve never understood the business model. Factoring in rebates that you never redeem, but think you will, printers cost about $80. An ink cartridge, in turn, costs $79. So you begin to see printers as disposable. Plus, when you buy a new computer, even if you fall to your knees and beg not to get a printer with it, they tell you it’s free and force you to take it. So they pile up.

I kept digging and found the scariest items of all: old computer monitors. There is a reason why those are still here. They are both heavier and larger than a small automobile. Even if I decided to clean out the graveyard tomorrow, the monitors would be stuck here at least until the end of the NFL season, because I don’t know who else I could hire to carry them down.

I find it especially hard to throw computers away. I spotted one at the bottom of a pile that looked like an original IBM with a huge cardboard floppy drive. It really was floppy. I’ve never understood why to this day, they keep calling the little 3.5 inch disks floppy. They are not.

This was a pre-Windows computer that only ran DOS — characters on a black screen. Remember DOS? It stood for “Disc Operating System.” You have to give it to Bill Gates. He really knew how to come up with sexy names.

One reason I don’t give away old computers is I don’t know how to wipe them out. I worry if I gave one to the Salvation Army, some future buyer will find that my brother once sent me a file of women walking around topless on one of those beaches in southern France, call the vice squad, and I’ll have a record as a pervert.

The real question is why am I keeping all this junk? It’s because they’re not like televisions with broken screens. They may no longer interface with the 2009 digital age, but mechanically, they’re in great shape.

It’s hard to throw out stuff in great shape, no matter how useless.

I expect the graveyard will get bigger.

mpatinkin@projo.com