Need Computer room flooring

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote: <Unnecessarily long story...> Well, at one point I needed it. You see, when I was storing my stuff at the ACCRC, we wanted to put up a nice computer museum there. There was a wide open (well, mostly anyway) 1200sqft space upstairs that was mostly dead space, so it was the perfect place for the museum. The only problem was the floor was in horrendous shape. The building we were occupying used to be an ice cream factory. So there were these huge steel i-beams cemented into the floor that acted as supports for the heavy machinery that was once there. The floors were sloped slightly to the drains. Run-off over years of spillage or hosing down the machines for cleaning (I suppose) caused erosion. So it was a big mess. At first we thought we would improve the floor by filling in the damage with a new layer of concrete. Hans and I set about bashing the i-beams rented. One set took several hours. It soon became apparent that this was not going to work. So the new idea was to cover it over with computer floor tiles. On multiple levels it was a cool idea: 1) it would make the floor look nicer; 2) it would even out the floor; 3) it was oh so classic. So we started looking, and looking, and looking, and nothing turned up. I called all over and checked all around and could not find anything. The real sad part is that the space I occupied before I moved in with the ACCRC had one area that was once a computer room for the county offices, and had about 400-500 square feet of nice computer tiles with the framing and everything. I was trying to get the building manager to let me have it but he wasn't sure he could let it go. Had he known that he would have eventually had to pay to have it removed (I'm assuming) once the building was renovated then he would've probably given me the go ahead. Anyway, finally, Brian Knittel of Quarterbyte clued me in that Lawrence Livermore National Labs had a batch of tiles listed on their monthly auction inventory. So being that I live only a couple blocks away from there, I mosied on over and checked them out. It turns out it was just the tiles: no supports. But still, considering that this is the only stuff I'd found, I figured I would come across the supports later or just figure something out. So I hauled it all to my house one pick-up load and SUV load at a time. Luckily I had a roommate then with a pickup. It took about 20 trips (20 very slow trips...going with any speed over any sized bump in the road resulted in violent recoil on the truck's suspension system). I checked around and found a computer floor tile outfit near my area. I talked to them about doing a trade--so many tiles for so much support material--but the tiles were so old (and with that blue carpet) that it was worthless to them. They didn't have any use for them nor did they have the right support material. So I went on to Plan B. I came up with a design for a grid system made of 1x2 wood slats from the hardware store (~$1 for an 8 foot slat) and bricks to support the corners and intersections. My (now wife's) birthday party was coming up and we wanted to have a nice outdoor area for people to lounge since it was the middle of August. But my backyard was/is still unlandscaped (i.e. weeds at the time). So since I needed to build a deck anyway, I decided to turn it into a feasibility study to see if my grid design would work. I decided to build an 8x12 tile (16'x24') deck with the floor tiles. I bought a pallet of broken up landscape bricks for something like $1.47 at Home Depot, so I had all the support structure I needed. The slats were another $40 or so, plus a box of screws. I spent a few days making grids, clearing the area, laying out bricks, leveling everything from every corner and angle, then finally placing the tiles. It worked great. The deck was very level and sturdy. I could jump up and down on it violently and it held (for the most part...I had one failure that I repaired). I finished it off by putting in some pavers from the cement pad by the sliding glass door to the deck, putting down some bark and some nicely placed potted plants, throwing up some bamboo fencing around the perimeter, and finally running Christmas lights around the border of the deck and the hanging icicle lights from the bamboo fence. Voila! Instant paradise. Unfortunately, it ended up being colder than usual that night and most people stayed in. But it was nice to have a place to hang out in the backyard finally (if only I'd put my money into landscaping rather than all these old computers :) I picked out the 350 nicest tiles (Livermore had decided to remodel on top of the tiles and then remove them, so a lot of them had drywall dust and sawdust all over them; others had stains or odd holes cut in them for ducting and what not) and hauled them all (50 at a time in my SUV) to the ACCRC. I carried each one (4-6 at a time) up a flight of stairs, all 350, and stacked them in the museum area. So finally, what happened at the ACCRC? Nothing. I lagged too much (my budget was shot), the ACCRC decided to move, and the project never materialized. So I ended up being stuck with having to dispose of 350 very decent computer floor tiles (no time or energy to move them back so into the metal bin they went), and still have 1,000 tiles sitting in my sideyard. I have a very nice deck to show for it though. It's going on its second winter and, amazingly, it's still holding up. The bamboo is long gone, and some of the corners have sunk a little and so it's not as even as it used to be, plus some of the carpet is peeling off from the tiles. At any rate, it's lasted through countless barbecues, a couple raucous nights with the water pipe (lots of burn marks), and two rainy seasons. It's not fun to walk on when it's wet, and the carpet has faded, but it's still nice to set out a lawn chair once in a while and think about the old machines that used to perform some imaginatively wild calculations while resting atop those same tiles :) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]