Scrapping and re-use (was Re: Talking of old IBM systems)

On 3/25/10, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood at btconnect.com> wrote: You were working in the UK, were you not? The stories I was hearing were told to me at a DECUS in the late 1980s in Anaheim, presumably about activities in the States. Certainly. There was also a lot of "self-maintenance" at the time, at least in the US. If folks could not afford DEC Field Service, there were third-party vendors galore to turn to for board-level spares. When the company was doing well, most of our big machines were under contract, but over time, more and more were allowed to lapse until I was doing maintenance for 95% of what broke, just as an example. Any items from this stream were already gray-market before they hit the streets. My understanding is that the arrangement was discovered when the occasional naive customer attempted to get service for something from DEC and the numbers didn't check out, so in the end the system "worked", even if there was a gap for a time. There would have been plenty of salvageable stuff even if 100% of the Qbus and Unibus boards had the fingers cut off before leaving the Mill (though it's entirely possible the scrappers were originally cutting those off themselves for gold recovery - it would have depended entirely on the arrangements negotiated). Back in the early-to-mid 1980s, intact system boards would have had a high potential resale value, but practically any DEC part was bought and sold by third-party vendors. Someone just took advantage of a situation, which was corrected by shoving all the material through teeth that let nothing bigger than a large postage stamp through. But as you say, you were there and I wasn't, so the story is hardly incontrovertible. It was already hearsay when I heard it 20ish years ago. -ethan