15 Jul
1997
15 Jul
'97
2:12 a.m.
On Mon, 14 Jul 1997, William Donzelli wrote:
I have seen many gems from DEC, mostly mid-1970s
PDP-11s and early VAXen.
I have yet to see any 12, 18, or 36 bit stuff from them, however. The old
IBMs never show up - most coming out now are 3081 and 3090 machines
(there is hope, as I heard a 360 was decommisioned in 1995!). I have also
seen early SGI equipment, but not much early Sun (I do not know why).
In my experience, Sun offers much more generous trade-in allowances than
SGI (at least in the educational market). For this reason, I'd imagine
that a large percentage of old Sun systems are sent back to California for
scrapping or dismantled in a manner that ensures that they will not be
traded in again. OTOH, I know of an SGI 4D/380 VGX that recently met the
scrappers (alas, before I could attempt a rescue) because of red tape and
the similarity of resale, scrap, and trade-in values.
If you are not into minis and workstations, do not
bother going. You will
not find Commodores, Ataris, old Apples, etc.
That's what I was expecting. Workstations are (obviously) much harder to
find than micros in the thrifts and swap meets around here, and are
therefore my primary junkyard scrounging goal. My single PDP-11 does,
however, look kind of lonely...
Thanks for the great information! I might give a few of these places a
call to see what their policies are. I'm expecting to be disappointed,
but you never know.
--
Scott Ware s-ware(a)nwu.edu