And it works absolutely perfectly. Turns out it’s actually a Zip 250, which is nice – and all the insides work splendidly. The keyboard I recovered at the same time is shot, sadly, but it’s just a standard PS/2 unit and will be simple to replace.

All it needs now is a clean and tidy and it’ll be as good as new. Not bad for something that was going to end up polluting some landfill site somewhere…

Further inspection revealed an Iomega Zip 100 drive, a 52x CD-ROM, and a 1.44MB floppy. And it was in mint condition, aside from being in a skip and covered in four days worth of rain. Have you guessed where this story is heading yet?

That’s right – I’m now the proud owner of a RiscPC with 16MB RAM, a 20GB hard drive, and all the extras mentioned above. The only snag is that I’m not sure if it actually works yet – I daren’t turn the thing on until I’m absolutely sure that it’s all dried out. With any luck – and judicious use of a dehumidifier – I should be able to fire the puppy up on Sunday.

It’s amazing what people throw out, really.