Physical connection to the past

Reading the introduction to the cooking book Melody of India Cuisine I was given pause by the opening sentence: "Mom and I started dabbling on our book twelve years ago on the model 1960 Underwood typewriter, the same typewriter my Dad had used to type his Ph. D. thesis." Given the book's publication date, the typewriter had been with them for 24 years. How many tools with personal history or significance do I still have? The IBM PC Jr and TurboPascal that I wrote my first compiler with? The Macintosh II Symantic THINK C++ IDE that I wrote Sextant with? Perl 4 that I used writing Mesa/Vista. To keep these tools would be silly. How do you retain this physical connection to the past?