A few of us were standing about talking in the hallway between our radio museum and the
ham club, and I happened to notice a small module of PCBs in the trash bin. Unable to
resist finding out what it was (or more accurately: what it once had been) I reached in
and pulled it out.
Turned out it had a 4004 system on it, so turned it into this:
The SWTPC 6800 I obtained a few years ago was, shall we say, diverted from going into the
trash.
On 2015-Jun-22, at 1:58 PM, Ian S. King wrote:
One day my girlfriend came home and told me she'd
seen some people dumping
what looked like circuit boards into a dumpster just a few blocks from our
apartment. We took a drive over and there are at least a dozen ADM-3/a
logic boards. Best yet: *all the chips were socketed*. And when I
acquired some complete 3/a's a few years later, I had the character
generator ROM for lower case! The girlfriend is long gone, but I'm sure
some of those chips are still in my TTL stash.
On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 5:59 PM, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
I have gotten some of my best stuff from the
trash ... One day I will
never
I suspect a lot of us have....
When I was at university I had official permision to skip-dive (dumpster
dive). Got
all sorts of things. Pulled my HP2100A + 7900 drive + paper tape reader
right out
of a skip. Nearly did my back in, but,,,
Another time I got a nice AR88LF communications receiver.
Then there was the time I saw a load of HP stuff... I grabbed the H1350
graphics
translator (lovely unit), etc. At the bottom was what looked to be an
HP9825. Well,
I had one of those but I thought I could probably find a home for a second
one. In
any case I'd grab the I/O modules from it, and see if it contained any
ROMs in the
front ports. So out it came. When I looked at it I realised it wasn't a
9825 at all,
it was the (much, much, rarer) 9831 (running BASIC not HPL) So of course I
grabbed
that.
But a lot of my finds came to me before they were thrown out. I was known
for
wanting just about any old electronic or computer gear.
-tony
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."