Retro Tech Galore At FreeGeek Twin Cities

welcome back to the save it for Parts Channel today we're checking out free geek a Minneapolis nonprofit that aims to reduce e-w and sustainably recycle old Tech products since that's basically what I do on this channel I thought this would be a great opportunity to see how it's done on a larger scale so we are free geek Twin Cities we are a nonprofit Electronics thrift store and recycling center uh we take people's unwanted Tech and then we try to either fix it up and give it a new lease on life or or if we can't rescue it then we recycle it ethically by hand one of the big things we try to tackle is e-waste in our community we want to make sure that the problem stays in Minneapolis and doesn't get sent outside of it so we strive to keep as much E-Waste out of the landfill and out of our water as as much as possible but then the other side of the mission is to see that this problem of ew can be turned into a solution so a lot of the Stu that we get donated if we manage to fix it up then we are able to get it into the hands of people that normally wouldn't be able to afford it and by doing that we kind of bridge this digital divide that is very present in our communities today because we take residential donations we get a lot of video game stuff as well and sometimes uh the amount is overwhelming as you can see at free geek there's a really big volunteer to staff pipeline um so pretty much every person here started out as a volunteer um and I'm no different I found out that there was a place nearby that had a bunch of video game volunteering um I've had uh history as a video game store owner um I've worked at many video game stores prior to that and I wanted to get back into it I think one of the most interesting things I ever came across was a um beta unit uh steam machine um and that that was actually one that we sent off to elus Tech tips um and needed a big video on that uh we get every now and then we get some prototype stuff or we'll get uh things like in gaming that we like engineering samples whenever that happens it makes me really happy I care immensely about video game preservation so normally whenever we get prototype things in I make sure to contact somebody who's in the preserving scene immediately and get that sent out so my favorite part about working here um I know this sounds corny and cliche but it's the people um because we're a nonprofit We don't really have that cloud of like corporate mentality over us we can actually treat each other like human beings um if somebody is sick instead of being like well think about what this will do to the team we'll say no stay home if you live in the Minneapolis area or the surrounding Twin Cities area and you would like somewhere to donate your Tech um please consider us over typical places like uh Goodwill or Salvation Army a lot of times those places can get overwhelmed and any additional Tech that they can't feasibly keep out on their shelves they will unfortunately just junk so we do not do that we actually properly dispose of the tech um so if you would like somewhere to donate your things where you know that it will have a fitting end please consider uh shopping with us and donating with us so my name's Daniel I'm uh the coordinator in the Apple department at Forge Twin City and what you're seeing here is my parts shelf um this is uh where we keep you know all sorts of parts for repairing Macs and computers that need repair so we deal in this department with everything from the very oldest to the very newest Apple products so we have things as old as an Apple 2 plus from 1980 in this room and things as new as a 2020 M1 MacBook Air um that's that's about the range that we've that we've gotten at least while I've been here but we do our best to save and restore everything that we possibly can our main priority is of course getting modern daily driver class kind of acxs um into the hands of people who need them but we're also very heavy on historical preservations so all of these beige machines up here that are waiting for um someone to come along and do some repair work on them we're we're very passionate about those in this department um and we are as freeek one of the only Electronics recyclers around that really cares about old beige stuff um so people will actually come across state lines to shop in our store and find whatever weird old stuff we have to offer them this is sort of a magical place it's the only place where you can really just walk in the door and get to work on some of this old stuff um that is in some cases totally unique the most interesting thing that I've come across this week an apple 2gs um that has some pretty special expansion cards in it so if you open this guy up pretty stacked out with cards and what we've got in here is we've got the usual memory expansion we've got a scuzzy card which not too unusual then we've got a SC Hardware screen grab card that you can just push this little button here and take a capture of your screen and then this here is a PC compatibility card basically an IBM PC XT on a card that you just pop into your Apple 2 uh GS here and you can run PC software on it and this some of these are cards that I didn't know existed until I opened this up and started Googling things so my name is Andrew and I manage the Retro department at freeek Twin Cities and generally retro is roughly anything more than 20 years old there's a little bit of fuzziness in that but the older the better my favorite part is working with the volunteers who come back here because a lot of them worked in the industry back in the 90s some of them worked in the industry in the 80s and they have all great stories about what it used to be like to program these things what it used to be like to fix them what's the most interesting piece of tech or item you've come across that's a very difficult question for for this area uh I would say at least right now we've got three pretty interesting systems back here they're all s00 systems so the MSI 8080 up there on the top shelf this big guy and then there's even another one back here I can never choose one particular item there's there's always something back here that's cool this place is probably the only place in the world where you can get the experience of being a volunteer and working on systems like this where there's no pressure at all you don't have to buy it you don't have to take it home it can be in your life for the time that you're here and it doesn't take up space at your house we've we've had people fly in from other states just to spend a day volunteering here it's really a special experience this is the recycling room this is kind of like the Beating Heart of our mission uh so whenever we get stuff that unfortunately does not make a cut it ends up here and a lot of times what we do is we will dismantle things by hand um because we want to try and Salvage as much as we can inside so we we'll take steel brass aluminum copper uh we'll take low grade circuit boards we'll take highgrade circuit boards we have a category for a whole bunch of different aspects of recycling um and we have a lot of volunteers that come in we'll do um we do corporate field trips we do uh field trips with local schools um we are a great place for people who want to come in and learn what's inside their Tech we get a lot of kids like little engineer brains curious about what's inside um so this room is very very near and dear to my heart so we have a downstream recycler um we've actually visited their facilities before once we've gotten like the raw material sorted then they'll buy it by the pound that's how we pay for our rent and staff and then any additional profits that we profits that we get from the thrift store they are funneled directly into the community work that we do um but anything that so the only things that we can't recycle in Minneapolis are Plastics and unfortunately that's about half of the bulk that comes out of unwanted Tech so sometimes we'll get things that are a little too goofy like people don't have the heart to take it apart sure so our audio guy does not like being on camera so I will explain a little bit about the audio room um so we get a lot of stuff like we'll get speakers TVs um media players we'll get um amps and like all sorts of things on the audio video spectrum and we do not discriminate we uh love getting that kind of stuff old and new um this room is really uh dedicated ated to fixing a bunch of old uh audio things I get a lot of CRT TVs those have been really big they've been making a Resurgence lately for uh old school gaming um we actually had one have one right there it's been making such a comeback that I want to say probably 25% of the work that's being done here is restoring CRTs um a lot of times there are other audio equipment that come in that just need belts replaced or have like disintegrating foam inside because they're like 40 years old um so we try to replace those usually a lot of those older things are really easy to fix and we do that here um we also really care about old forgotten Media or failed media so we'll get a lot of things like we'll get laser dis players we'll get betamax we'll get like video CD we'll get all that stuff that if if you guys know who techone is um we get a lot of stuff that he would cover on his channel uh comes in here and then we can uh fix it up and give it a new life I'm Alex and I'm the assistant modern build lab manager I mostly supervise volunteers but I also test hardware and I make sure that our data security policy is is covered I have a lot of people that come in for the first time and I like to get them settled and I like to teach some things and I'm really glad when my volunteers say like oh I've left with something productive cuz it means like I'm doing a good job and I'm teaching them something good and useful cuz I mean I've had people come back and be like hey you've you've help helped me understand my own computer a little more so I figured out a lot of this and this I give them a slight little tour around the lab I showed them like this is my part spin this is the structural support pile of computers don't knock them over and then I show them through my build sheet and then I set them on their way with something that they feel comfortable with out of my intake honestly I think our weirdest piece would have to be a lime green transparent power supply at least in my terms working here but this is probably our newest piece too bad it is it's got one artifact in gramar ship so it's in the to fix Benin I'm Adam I work at a freeek Twin Cities here as the technology trainer and I'm the program administrator for a laptop program that we have with henan County uh they send us laptops and uh accessories to go to laptops and we uh we distribute those to people who have Financial need we have a county Grant uh that allows us to uh pay our staff that's involved with that and then to make sure we get laptops to folks uh so we hand those out here at freeek cities and we hand those out also at a spot on at the University of Minnesota once a week I actually uh was a volunteer in the Retro Department um so I applied I have a YouTube channel I used to live in um Knoxville Tennessee so always wanted to visit here but thought I would thought I would never get to then my wife got relocated uh for her job to Minneapolis and as soon as I heard that we were doing that I immediately came over here and applied to be a volunteer did that for a couple of months and then this position opened up so I grabbed that my YouTube channel is retro Tech toys so it's all about retro technology and kind of you know edutainment and things like that I think the people that come in here are amazing because just seeing people who love the same stuff that you love and they're just in here all day every day and that's the customers that's the volunteers the people that work here so I think that's the biggest part of it and also saving all these things that come in that would otherwise be e-w uh we can save them and give them a second home where they can be enjoyed or displayed you know cared for like they should be there's no other place around here that does everything that we do there are a couple of places that do a little bit like there are places that refurbish computers there are places that have free computers that they you know hand out to folks with financial need but nobody does this thing that we do where we take in games and we restore game consoles and we do retro content and all these old Macs from like you know 1982 or 1976 and just all the things that we do here like nobody within another 200 miles I would say has what we have we have an msai in the back uh and the Retro department and that thing is really cool uh we've gotten that thing restored this was someone coming in a volunteer programmed it to play music freek is going to be doing a lot of free classes soon we're already doing some free classes we do uh we teach people how to solder how to build computers all that kind of stuff and we're going to be adding like a lot of cyber security courses and all sorts of things soon and most of it's going to be free for everyone to come in and enjoy all right we'll wrap up this video here with a look at some of the random stuff in the free geek retail store they have everything from Modern computers vintage computers accessories Game Parts audio video stuff just any kind of tech stuff you could possibly want old or new so if you're in the Minneapolis St Paul area I would definitely recommend stopping by the free geek store on 25th Avenue South in Minneapolis check out what they've got donate your old unwanted Tech stuff and if you've got the time and interest definitely consider volunteering with them they have all kinds of cool opportunities and the one thing that everybody I talked to at free geek said was how much they love meeting new people how much they love their volunteers and their fellow staff members and just how unique and how cool of a place this is I certainly enjoy it and I've picked up something unique for my YouTube channel every time I've been to free geek so I am going to continue visiting there if I ever manage to find any free time I will definitely consider volunteering there anyway I hope you've enjoyed this inside look at free geek Twin Cities huge huge thank you you to all of the staff members who took time out of their busy day to talk to me to give interviews to show me around the store give me tours of their backstage and behind the scenes areas and just generally share their love of vintage Tech and their commitment to keeping e-waist out of the landfill free geek has a wonderful mission that I can get behind so I would highly recommend supporting them in any way you can I'll throw links to their website and their address down below if you want to visit free geek yourself in the meantime stay tuned for further videos we will probably have more weird junk that we picked up at free geek and we'll take a look at those in the future thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 30,616

Keywords: computers, electronics, recycling, restoration, retro, e-waste, sustainable, ethical, landfill, dumpster, donation, volunteer, nonprofit, apple, vintage, antique

Id: FXgFd2ySpCY

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2024