When browsing through the PriceGrabber website the other day I came across this Belkin Mini Computer Vacuum which seemed like quite an interesting idea. Presumably it could be used to try and get at all those crumbs of chocolate and biscuit that have been lost between the keys of your keyboard!

It also brought back memories of my early days working with computers and at the risk of giving away how ancient I am, I thought I would share one story. In my first job overseas I worked in the Libyan capital Tripoli. I was involved in the computer processing of seismic data collected in the desert during the search for oil. This was quite compute intensive, (indeed it still is today), and the office worked round the clock 364 days a year (we had Christmas day off). We had two computers which each had 64 Mb memory, a CPU with a separate array processor for number crunching, 3 large tape decks and a 80 Mb hard disk drive the size of a washing machine! We communicated with them via punch cards and a teletype machine, while all the data was kept on tapes.

The room where the computers where housed however would often, especially during dust storms, get a lot of sand and dust coming in through the holes in the wall in which the air condition units were housed. I have vivid memories of our computer engineers pulling the circuit boards out of the back of the machines, blowing the dust and sand off each board and resetting individual chips and other components in the board with a very firm tap! It was a long way from todays environmentally controlled computer rooms but seemed to work.

Anyway back to the mini computer vacuum. Computer components do get quite a build up of dust and (food) overtime, and it can be well worth doing a spring clean from time to time. So a vacuum could well be a useful purchase, however an alternative is just to buy an air dusting can, which is just what our engineers used to use!