Some comments...
> Hey folks. I just had a disturbing
conversation with an eBay seller
> up in Canada. One of his auctions was for DRAM chips "for gold scrap"
> that he claimed to have "removed from some old DEC computer". I sent
> him a question asking him what happened to the rest of it, and
> reminding him that "some old DEC computer" was likely worth orders of
> magnitude more than the trivial amount of gold that one might glean
> from recycling DRAM chips.
Quite a few DRAMs, even in plastic DIPs, can have a large amount of gold
inside.
>> Not anymore. In case you haven't
noticed, the market for DEC PDP
>> stuff is gone. All of the collectors have as much as they want and
>> nobody is actually using Qbus anymore. The same happened about a year
>> ago with IBM MCA stuff. You can't even get $10 a card anymore. I've
>> shipped out hundreds of pounds of DEC Qbus and IBM MCA for scrap
>> metals. You should do the same.
>
> This is, of course, COMPLETELY incorrect, aside from being
> disturbing. The DEC collector market is booming like never before,
> and growing like crazy.
While I think the scrapper is shooting himself in the foot by lumping all
DEC PDP-11 stuff together, he does have a point. Many DEC cards are
extremely common. Everybody seems to have a pile. Put one up on Ebay, and
you might only get a couple or three bucks.
The competition is the scrap market. In case you folks have not noticed,
scrap is ASTOUNDING high right now - gold, silver, and especially
copper. A scrapper can make lots of money just chucking the boards in a
container headed to the refinery. OK, so he will not make the same money -
maybe one or two dollars instead of two or three or maybe five (on a good
day), but he will expend about 20 seconds of his time as compared to ten
minutes of Ebay time per board.
The scrapper is hurting himself by not knowing what to pull for Ebay, and
what to chuck. Rather than yell at the scrapper for high crimes - he will
probably just laugh and then throw the boards into the container with a
little extra gusto - inform him of the real value of the gems. Offer to
buy them AT MARKET VALUE with cash on the spot. The payoff can be great.
William Donzelli
aw288 at
osfn.org