This is very true. Sometimes the deadlines are very capricious and
unrealistic. I dislike having to move a truckload of material on a day's
notice or less.
On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Megan wrote:
I tried for several months to give away a Vax
11/780 and a couple of
tons (literally) of DEC equipment including a pair of 11/34's with
enough spare parts to built a couple of other 11/34's. The whole lot
went to the scrapper. Of course this was in 1998-1999, but it was all
available for free pickup near Dallas. The sad thing was that the whole
lot had just been decommsioned and was a couple of months off a
DEC/Compaq service contract. There were a couple of pickup loads of
manuals and a large raised floor computer room with modular half glass
walls, a Liebert A/C unit and a Liebert UPS/power conditioner included.
All of the software backup tapes were included. There were racks and
racks of tapes. I didn't have storage space and I'm not into large
systems anyway, so it was finally scrapped. This was all located at a
LOF Automotive glass plant in Sherman, TX.
Aha.. this is probably one of those cases where it all had to go, or
none of it could. Companies decommissioning sites typically have this
problem since they are not equipped to have people show up and take
parts of an installation... They are also probably under time constraints
to have the hardware out.
This is what happened a couple of years ago with a DECsystem-10
installation in cambridge. I was contacted because a friend of
the site knew I was interested in a -10... what I found out was
that they had three -10s and other hardware, and it all had to
go at one time, and by a certain time. If I hadn't found a team
of people who were willing to take parts of the site and help
load/unload, it would have gone to the crushers as well.
Megan Gentry
Former RT-11 Developer
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL | email: gentry at
zk3.dec.com (work) |
| Unix Support Engineering Group | mbg at
world.std.com (home) |
| Hewlett Packard | (s/ at /@/) |
| 110 Spitbrook Rd. ZK03-2/T43 | URL:
http://world.std.com/~mbg/ |
| Nashua, NH 03062 | "pdp-11 programmer - some assembler |
| (603) 884 1055 (DEC '77-'98) | required." - mbg KB1FCA |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
Shady Lea, Rhode Island
"Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
- Ovid