On Sat, 7 May 2011, arcarlini at iee.org wrote: Please wait for Petabyte drives to come out. It'll keep costs down. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Looking at the vintage computing on ebay, there's someone with 15 Ppro chips "for gold recovery" and it's been bid up to $390. I am fairly sure that the amount of gold in a Ppro chip is not worth that much, plus the cost of extracting it is pretty high....

At 10:55 PM 5/7/2011, William Donzelli wrote: Yes, this list had this discussion last November. Since then, I mismantled the two quad PPro servers I had. I'm tempted to keep one for fun and sell the others, but there's a part of me that has low trust for a fanatic gold buyer on eBay. - John

On 5/7/11 8:55 PM, "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: Unless I am mistaken, the plating on the lid is only a couple microns thick. And while the chips themselves weigh in at 6.8 ish ounces each, only a small portion of that is metals, the bulk of the weight is ceramic material. I tried to find current data on how much gold is contained in ppro chips, but all I was able to find were links to pay "make a fortune in gold recovery" e-books.... 1 ounce = 28.3495231 grams Since it it precious metal weight we are discussing here.... 1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams Ah, finally a hit or two.... It looks like Ppro chips have .5 to .75 grams of gold per chip. So to get 1 ounce of gold you would need roughly 62 chips (.75 grams was for processing at an actual lab, not in a home setting), and that is assuming that you are able to extract the minimum and that you can get pure gold as an end product without serious lab equipment.... So assuming one were to be able to process pure gold out of those chips, $390 is pretty much the break even point where you spent as much on the chips as you are going to get out of them from processing (and that isn't even taking into account the time spent on extracting, and the cost of the chemicals and equipment used in processing the chips.) Having torn one of them apart years ago when it burned out, I can tell you that the wires running through the ceramic are not gold. And the sites I've found information on mention palladium and other metals in the ceramic.

Ian King [IanK at vulcan.com] wrote: For $65k surely you'd get more than the promise that maybe some peanuts might be included? You'd have to be very brave (and rich) to bid on this one. Antonio arcarlini at iee.org

On Sun, 8 May 2011, Tony Duell wrote: What is the width of the faceplate of the drive? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Comparing it with the width of the disk slot, I would say under 6"... OK, I am sure I can find 2 points inside the drive that are 6" apart (like pin 1 of this IC to pin 13 of that IC :-)).... For that matter I could probably find 2 points inside a TM100 that are 3.5" apart. Does that make it a 3.5" drtve? :-) -tony

IIRC, most 8" drives were 48tpi, and had 77 cylinders. What I don't know is the radius of the outside cylinder (which would be track 0 on side 0 IIRC). It's got to be A little under 4", of course. I don;t have a spare 8" disk to rip apart and measure the diameter of the magnetic disk itself, nor do I know how far in track 0 is fro mthe edge of the disk. Once we know that, obvious places pf the directory are on track 0, track 1 (allowing track 0 to be used for a bootstrap) and track 38 (in the middle). Which would be 0, 1/48" and 38/48" in from the position of track 0. [Yes I did once -- but only once -- make the mistake of forgetting to divide the change in diameter by 2 when turning a metal part. In other words I thought 'Oh, I need to take 50 thou off the diameter' and then moved my cutting too in my 50 thou (in several passes of course) on the lathe. Result : the part was undersized, I'd reduced the radius by 50 thou, and thus the diameter by 100 thou. I am otld some Americal lathes have the cross-slide calibrated so that the cutting tool moves half the distance it claims, the side is calibrated for the change in diameter. British lathes do what they say, the slide is calibrated for the actual distance the tool moves. Which is actually more convenient, particualrly if you also do milling or drilling in the the lathe.] -tony

Oh don;t get me startedon that one. It's one of my pet hates. The focal length fo a lens as a simple, optical, maining. And the real value should be quoted, not some 'corrected' value. Around I'v got cameras for a number of film sizes from sub-miniature to medium format. Every one of the lenses, if it's marked at all, is marked with the real focal length. So yes, the 'standard' lens might well be 24mm, 30mm, 35mm, 50 mm, 75mm or 80mm. Thsi does not confuse me... Oh, and the next person who claims that changing the focal length affects perspective is likely ot end up being shown another use for an MPP monorail :-) It;s going to be getting towards 6", I think, but the only AT I have set up here is the one I am typing this on, and I don;'t feel like dismantling it to check. -tony

the salvation army bit right off the hop would turn me away from biding due to the fact they are corupt organization that has created public health problems in my city for years and gets away with it cause no one has the balls to make them clean up their act agg! end rant thats a crazy amount wonder if it comes with free delivery to ur door?