Sphere papers gone

There is a reason I did that. In a previous giveaway, NSFnet stuff, I was flooded by lots of people simply wanting the tape drives and nothing else (there was one exception). This did not make me very happy, as I felt that many of the respondants did not care about where these drives came from, rather that they were free drives. Much of this old NSFnet stuff (there is more free stuff to come - I unearthed some of the OOB modems, useful when the network crashed) really does have far more historical value than actual value. These machines (the RS/6000s with appropriate other things), numbering 75 or so, were the "Internet" for some time, and fuelled its explosive growth thru the first part of the 1990s, until the other ISPs started to appear. I am not saying that the Sphere papers are of real historical significance - the company simply did not last very long, and in my opinion, was a producer of junk - but anything Sphere is very rare. Speaking of NSFnet stuff, I may be able to get some of the really old stuff, when the network was built with RTs, token rings, and 56 K DSUs. If I can get one of the old RTs, would the Vintage Computer Festival people be interested as a door prize? I have seen very little as well. That says something, as the boards tend to really stick out in the crowd. They never reached the popularity of the S-100 stuff, and was probably made in quantities much smaller than just about every other bus. William Donzelli william(a)ans.net