pdp 11s to be auctioned at Goddard - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

21 Mar 2001

On March 21, Bill Sudbrink wrote:
...
     I've
been to several of these.  While otherwise wonderful, these
 auctions have classic "government auction" problems.  You'll see, for
 example, a lot consisting of three pallets of stuff...one will contain
 a Dynabyte or something like that with ZERO cash value but that you'd
 really love to get, and the rest of it will consist of 2.5 pallets of
 dead VGA monitors.  During the auction you'll find some guy who bids
 the lot up to $3,000.  Wondering why, you watch him loading it into
 his truck at the end of the day...and underneath the dead VGA monitors
 will be one HP 8566B spectrum analyzer or something like that, that he
 will have ALREADY SOLD on his cell phone for $20,000.  
 In your expirence, and using the above example, could you approach the guy
 and make an offer for the Dynabyte or will he get pissy or greedy? 
  That works sometimes...unless it's a big machine and the guy is
planning on scrapping it for gold.  I lost out on a gorgeous Convex
C3800 supercomputer about two years ago that way.  The $3000 I had in
my pocket was less than the scrapper got for the gold in the machine.

  For smaller stuff, though, as long as they don't smell money, that
approach does work.

            -Dave McGuire