Bay Area: IBM 4341 and HP3000

I mean, I "understand" the mindset of these sellers insofar as they think, oh, there's gotta be one big Fortune 500 company, or some government agency that is just so completely dependent on some legacy system; someday it will break down and they will need a part at any price and I WILL BE THERE! Unfortunately for them it usually doesn't work that way; especially with all the very clever emulation solutions out there, it's been possible to break the dependence of these legacy software systems, on their associated legacy hardware. So it just sits, and sits, and sits and eventually it just goes off to the scrap yard when they don't get any offers that meet their wild expectations. But that's just how it is, dealing with people who are in this as a business. They aren't going to do a deal because they want to see something historic get saved, or they want to see someone who could actually use it, enjoy it. They just want to see cash money on the table. That's fair. They're dealers, not collectors. That said, sometimes I have made an offer and noted "hey, I'm a hobbyist, not a business" and I think it's helped me win the day, so, there are vendors out there sensitive to the hobbyist community (once the inventory gets stale enough, maybe? LOL). I just like to see this stuff run, to have the opportunity to play with it; laying your hands on some real hardware if you can is just a whole different level of experience beyond an emulator, of course, I'm a "hardware guy". Al's post, it didn't bug me. Being in my line of work, I encounter lots of folks who are, ah, a bit blunt, or lacking in the social graces to one degree or another... just comes with the territory. It is, of course, food for thought. His line of thinking is definitely something we should have a cogent response for; my dad is similar in his thinking, he's had a long and successful engineering career and his general opinion is this historical preservation is a waste of time and money, "history is bunk", etc. and I've been trying to convince him of the historicity of his work personally and of all the various bits of ephemera accumulated over the course of his 40+ year career. Because I do believe this work, that was done on these computers, this software, is valuable and historically relevant... I don't believe EE/CS is uniquely "post-historic" and I think all practitioners in the field should consider the historical factors involved in their work... It's important to preserve this stuff; "you don't know where you're going until you know where you've been". Just as the architects and civil engineers have preserved strange old buildings, the aeronautical guys are preserving old aircraft, the mechanical guys are preserving old cars, locomotives, what have you... these are the artifacts of our field, our profession... why be so quick to relegate the entire historical record of computer engineering to the dustbin? Best, Sean On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 4:28 AM, jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> wrote: