classics I threw away or sold ... foolishly

[Marc Howard]

I'd love to get one of those (PXM9XX).  I designed the video card and the
active backplane.  I had to route all the ECL data paths by hand as there
were no automated tools for that at the time.

That beast was built in an amazingly short period of time, about 8-9 months
as I recall.  The DSP32 processors  in there had gold plated pins on the
bottom as well as gold plated pads on the topside of each PGA.  You could
probe signals from the top of the board which was really handy.

Marc


On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:43 PM, George Currie <g at kurico.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 18 May 2016 14:50:17 -0600 (MDT), Swift Griggs <
> swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've stack-ranked all the classic items that I, to my everlasting shame,
>> let go of at some point and now I feel like it was a mistake:
>>
>
> It wasn't one I ever really possessed so technically it wasn't a
> throw/sell away, but it was one that got away.
>
> That as an AT&T Pixel Machines PXM900.  It was at an university auction, I
> had already gone way over budget and I would have had to bid on the entire
> pallet of stuff in order to get it.  I anguished, bid anyway, got outbid
> and declined to bid further.  I immediately regretted the decision,
> contacted the buyer right after the auction, he told me he'd get back to me
> on Monday (yeah, you can see it coming).  When I called on Monday, he was
> glowing about how much gold was in the thing and he had already scrapped it
> :(
>
> I still regret that decision to this day (if it wasn't already obvious).
>
> Sigh.
>