4 Feb
2002
4 Feb
'02
6:03 a.m.
On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Doc Shipley wrote:
I think I took a part-time job in Hell today. A
non-profit corp who
funds its computers-for-children program by "salvaging" donated
equipment. That means selling most of it by the pound. I'll be working
for trade, for a while.
DO they at least refurbish modernish PCs that come through the door or do
they salvage those as well?
The Alameda County Computer Resource Center refurbishes anything that
comes through that's Pentium-100 and above (I think they're edging towards
133 and above now). They'll take the best parts from what comes in to
build the best systems they can. Minimum configuration is P100/133, 64MB
RAM, 1GB HD. All machines come with a keyboard, mouse, SVGA display,
CD-ROM, and network interface. A new-in-the-box copy of SuSE Linux 7.1
Personal Edition is also included (thanks to a generous donation of 30,000
packages from SuSE in Oakland, CA).
Sometimes whole lots of one thing will come in, for example monitors,
CPUs, keyboards, network cards, CD-ROM drives, etc. Most of the time it's
individual machines that get stripped down and then rebuilt into new and
tested machines.
The rest of what comes in gets salvaged to pay for the operation
(container loads of plastic and metal get sent to China monthly, and CRTs
are even recycled through some operation in Utah). Up until this year,
the ACCRC operated mostly on funds generated within the organization
(they used to hold Saturday sales but the support issues got old after a
while).
http://www.accrc.org
1 IBM rack - Says it's part of a phone system.
Behind a large
deteriorating box, so all I could see was an 8" floppy drive
unit, and what looked like a 3/4" tape drive.
It might be either a System/36 or System/38. Sounds interesting.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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