13 May
2002
13 May
'02
10:48 a.m.
On Mon, 13 May 2002, Douglas H. Quebbeman wrote:
But the stated reason was that they only want to buy in bulk, not onesies
and twosies.
My guess is
that the reporter failed to grasp that they are probably
looking for milspec parts, as opposed to the common stuff found in PCs and
whatnot. These of course would be far harder to find in quantity.
I don't doubt that they are also looking for regular parts for test
systems as well. I know they are using a lot of older systems. Last year
I did a data recovery job for them where the data was 8080 assembly code.
God knows, reporters are idiots about everything except journalism,
and who cares except another journalist. But this reporter made a
point of stating that the stuff most people have in their basements
doesn't qualify as NASA-sought-after... But clearly, as they buy only in bulk from
"qualified"
suppliers, no one on the list other than Sellam might
have what they want in bulk.
This is true at least of what I do have in bulk. Hopefully one of their
ground systems relied on a Commodore 64. I can sell them a couple pallet
loads of those suckers ;)
However, this could still put pressure on the supplies
of
stuff that we like to collect. Think about the effect as
it propagates upstream...
Well, I'm not wont for any IBM PCs, but I'm sure there are some rare items
that they may be snapping up. I guess that means Joe will have first dibs
on a lot of cool stuff in about 10 years when NASA finally starts
obsoleting all this stuff.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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