On Jun 14, 2013, at 10:30 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Absolutely. But how much gold is actually in those boards? Surely not $200 worth, especially once you consider the effort it takes to separate it out (which is obviously reduced when doing it in much larger bulk). - Dave

On 06/14/2013 03:13 AM, Christopher Satterfield wrote: They DID scrap it themselves. The process of recovering the gold, however, is dangerous and smells bad. All these dolts are doing is harvesting what they perceive to be "gold ore" and selling it to "refineries". Anyone care to guess how many Pro380s there are left? There weren't many made to begin with. I'd guess there are fewer than 200 left. And now there's one less. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

Not worth it? People dig huge holes in mountains using expensive machinery in the middle of nowhere to find a few grams of gold per ton of dirt/stone and still make money. There is plenty of gold and copper in old machines to make it worth the effort, the older and more high tech the better. If you get bored someday go check out http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/forum.php they even have a couple people who actually do the refining on there (and there is a whole other forum out there just for do it yourself gold recovery). Scappers want to maximize their return, and they pretty much have to pay for their scrap these days since everyone is out looking (growth industry since gold skyrocketed). There are a ton of clueless people on ebay buying scrap processors and other ewaste for more then it is worth that doesn't help things. People have an inflated idea of how much gold is in computer parts and don't understand you cannot extract all of it (and extraction itself has costs). I have passed on deals because shipping is just too expensive for my hobby. Some of that stuff finds a new home elsewhere or gets recycled into iphones. You can complain that rare machines get scrapped, but if nobody wants to pay over scrap for them what else do you think will happen to them? Scrappers would love to get 3x their scrap value or more for an item they don't have to rip apart. -----Original Message----- From: Cory Smelosky Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 12:42 PM To: Dave McGuire Cc: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: [cctalk] People suck++ On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: It's barely even worth it. You won't get much back, right? I don't recall most systems having high concentrations of gold... -- -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

On 06/16/2013 01:50 PM, Mike wrote: Interesting! Wow that must smell horrible. In the context of DEC boards, I would, depending on the board. Less common ones sure do. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 16/06/13 1:50 PM, Mike wrote: "Their barbecue"? In many cases villagers are just cooking them over open fires, which is highly toxic, and destroys the local water tables. Many regions in Asia now have no drinking water because of this. * http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-disaster-of-e-waste-in-china * http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/high-tech-trash/carroll-text * http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/multimedia/photos/chinese-women-… * http://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/the-environment/urban-and-…

There was a time, when I was young, and dinosaurs did not yet roam the earth, . . . when "untested" meant UNTESTED. There was a very high probability that it worked. No reason not to take a chance on it. You could buy a memory board, and it was likely to work. THEN, you could buy a memory board, replace a few chips and have it work. THEN, you could buy a memory board, and the seller would have populated it with every bad chip that they could find. Then, the seller would replace chips to find working ones, and assemble the boards that tested bad with the chips that tested bad. NOW, "untested" is a LIE; it means TESTED, known to be bad, and beyond the repair capabilities of whoever tested it. If you are skilled at making repairs, it is still potentially a reasonable deal for the board on which to rebuild the circuit. But now, you can assume that others have failed before you, and that one or more of the most expensive LSICs that came with it are bad. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

The boards on the left of the first photo (the wide, short ones) look to be Josh On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote: