6 historic tech items that were rescued from the trash

[Ian S. King]

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."