Eli Heffrons on Hampshire Street, Cambridge,MA, USA

Bob Shannon wrote: . the Eli Heffron days. Yow! I drive by the site every now and again and shed a tear for what was once a wonderful place to lose an afternoon. Back around '89-91 I worked at MIT and Eli's was a prime source of parts for labs with tight hardware budgets to repair/upgrade their ailing MicroVAX II's and such. I remember wandering the shelves and seeing RX0n drive cabinets, whole pdp-11/44's, and other goodies that I didn't do anything about. What I did do was buy an SGI Iris 3130 with monitor -- nobody seemed to know what it was, but I got it to boot. I believe I paid $2k for that thing with 20" color monitor, and hauled it home in a friend's car. Fooled around with that for a couple months but something in the monitor went, probably a flyback. I decided by that time that I needed a Sun for a project I wanted to do when I returned to college (anybody remember UCB's Sprite?), so I sold the thing with a dead monitor for the same price. Who knows, maybe I could have gotten more, the thing was loaded with bitplane and Geometry Engine boards. But the weird System III derivative OS really put me off at the time. Manys the time I've wished I could go back in time and raid those shelves, or browse through the tables of electronics parts... --Steve.