[rescue] Report from Laurel, MD trip and a note to those of us *selling* i tems on eBay...

[Ken Hansen]

Hello all,

Well I spent an enjoyable afternoon/evening in Laurel, MD with both Mike N. & David McGuire, and I thought I would drop a note to the list relating my impressions of what I saw:

	First, avoid "the boys" areound feeding time - Dave thought it felt like a
	"Bar-b-que night," so we went to their favorite BBQ place, and while the
	food was good, I am *still* reminded of the meal two days afterwards...
	Oh, and in case anyone is interested, a half a chicken, half a rack of ribs
	is just too much food for one person. The responsible (?) meal wpould have
	been one of their sandwiches...

	Dave's house is amazingly small, for what is is in it. Dave has 3 Crays, which
	is really too many, becuuse after the second, the "gee-whiz" factor is gone. ;^)

	Dave also has all his hallways and corridors lined with "prizes" - a well
	organized eBay purge would turn up some good money for Dave I suspect,
	but I believe he cherishes his "prizes" too much to part with them.

	I honestly lost count the number of times either Mike or Dave would pause,
	bear-down, and make themselves feel better (at the expense of all near-by).
	My visit reminded me of a drawn-out version of the baked bean dinner scene
	in Blazing Saddles - but in a good way, honest!

After catching-up on our mutual friend, we went over and visited Mike N. next door... After relating our shared pain regarding the Ultra 2 market, we went on to discuss numerous other goings-on in the area, until Dave got hungry. That got us to the BBQ store, where the food was very good.

After dinner, we dinked around a bit, then I brought out my "prize" - a DEC Pro/350 that I have owned since new in 1983. I had not powered it up in nearly 15 years by my calculations, and to my suprise, it booted right up. Of course, after being off for so long I needed to enter date/time. This was the first problem - the date would only accept 1982 - 1999 for the year! Do Dave & I decided to do the "time warp (again)" and set the clock to two years ago (July 7, 1999), and that got us to our second problem - logging in.

I had no idea what the user-ids/passwords were.

After poking around, I happened upon the right combination, and we were in! This is when the giggling started (for me).

We noodled around, and found that while I had a large HD (30++ Meg!), I had verly little software on it. ;^( I did get to see  what passwed for a windows manager in 1985 - the Synergy Windowing system. Boy, was it *slow*...

Then after exhausting all possibilities with what was on my drive, we swapped in my other HD, a 10 Meg one that should have a complete DEC Pro Tool Kit installed (making this a near-RSX-11M-Plus system), but alas, the years had not been kind to that particular piece of hardware - the drive was not spinning up ;^(

Then we went to the warehouse. Oh my, the warehouse....

If anyone is looking for some piece of hardware that was popular10+ years ago, this is the place to be!

I got to see *two* BB&N imps, a metric butt-load of ELC/SLCs, Mac bits galore, and a large array of Next cube monitors & laser printers.

And a couple Dec Pros too. Two Pro 350s and one Pro 380 (really a system console for a a largish VAX onth efirst floor). We scouted out the available parts, and came away with a telephone management system for the Pro, and another HD to poke around on.

The HD had a really old version of PO/S (a *Really* bad name for an OS), but it had some interesting applications to play with, but no toolkit.

Then we started looking around for more info/software for these machines, but there was not much available at the time, which was good, since it was about 1:00 am (and I had a three-hour drive between me and my bed). I have since found many resources for the old Pro out on the internet, and I just picked up a single-port terminal server that I hope will allow me to put a serial port on my local ethernet backbone at home. Then, to install RT-11 or Venix and I will have a kick-ass PDP/11-23+ (sorta, IIRC) on my home network!

Finally, for the eBay tip (a reward for plowing thorough the above ;^) - I just this weekend sold one of my Ultra 2/2300s and one of my two Comdisco Ultra 30s to *foreign* buyers. I lost a little bit of money on the Ultra 2, but I also degraded the spec's from when I got it (I pulled the 4x 128 Meg DIMMs and replaced them with 4x64 Meg DIMMs, pulled one of the two 4 G HDs and removed the "extra" 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet card). That machine is going to Japan once payment is arranged (using PayPal).

The Ultra 30 sold for nearly twice what I paid for the pair (!), so end result was I got an Ultra 30 w/o framebuffer for around $50. As I said before, Comdisco should be getting more of these systems in about a month, so keep checking their web site...

Bottom line, the International market has different valuations for older Sun hardware than we do here in the US - when you sell items on eBay, be sure and check the "will sell internationally" box.

It was a good weekend all around!

Ken
(Mike N. - Please send me prices for a framebuffer/PCi card for my Ultra 30, we didn't get a chance to discuss them on Saturday)