From: "Brian Knittel" <brian at
quarterbyte.com>
Looks like the lot has 4 brand new 029s and two used machines, at
least
one of which is an 026. Somebody go get these! Or, do what I did in
2001 when a lot came up, and get a group together to buy them and
divvy
them up. These don't come along that often.
Looks like there is some interesting old radar display gear in there
too, which some military buffs would probably want. Are those
scope hoods made of Bakelite?
http://cgi.govliquidation.com/auction/view?id=2037010&categoryId=c7149
There's a whole bunch of other stuff in the lot, but you can call the
DRMO staff and see if they can either keep and relist the remainder,
or
give it to a surplus dealer. There are usually surplus dealers hanging
around happy to haul off whatever doesn't sell or what gets abandoned.
It's the logistics of shipping and dispersing the stuff that's
painful.
Looks like the four new 029s are crated, the 026(s) are sitting on
pallets, and they'll have to be padded and strapped.
In the 2001, I used
freightquote.com and scheduled a pickup & had the
units sent to the people in the group. FYI I just looked at the bills
of lading, we listed the factory-crated 029's as 520 lbs each, and the
029s on pallets as 310 lbs each. At today's rates, you should be able
to ship a palletized unit from Ohio to, say, California, with a
liftgate delivery, for about $250, and a crated unit for about $350.
I'd be interested to know on or off list what happens with these,
punched card stuff is one of my areas of interest.
Brian
If by chance you get a group together who want to do a group purchase
with a scrap dealer, I would be very interested. I'm not likely to
ever find another .029 in as new condition, presumably with the
program drum which I've been outbid at silly money on eBay. Ohio to
California is quite a long way, so maybe 2 or three times as much for
shipping across the Atlantic, would be worthwhile for an AS NEW one,
but not for spares. As long as it can work on 50Hz mains frequency,
voltage no problem. I would also be very interested in an old control
drum if there's one in the .026 and it gets scrapped. The printing
mechanism too maybe if its not too difficult to remove.
My alternatives are to restore my IBM 836 keypunch (like an 026 but
with more bells and whistles) or to resurrect a spare online punch and
interface it to my Mac. This will take many hours of effort, though it
would also get me a fairly slow card reader. The mechanism is an IBM
design made under licence by British Tabulating Machine Co (BTM) and
its successor company, International Computers and Tabulators (ICT),
the main mechanism of which seems identical to the one on the IBM 1401
restoration web site. Old keypunches just don't seem to come up any
more in the UK.