[rescue] You want balls?

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Depending on your state, usually the someone in authority is someone
who turns their back while you make it dissapear.

The rules/regulation/hoops that state schools in MA have to go through
usually result in hardware being kept around forever before it ever
gets released (because it is such a hassle I guess).

Back in around 1987-1988 I got some stuff out of my university.. but
what I got was: 300 baud acoustic (sp?) coupled modem, Teleray TE10
terminal, Digital VT52 terminal, Decwriter IV (LA120), Digital 
Word Terminal 78 (WT/78) with two dual 8" external floppy drives, and
misc electronic parts I scrapped out of other junk.

Very old almost useless stuff.  Although I did use the VT52 and the
acoustic coupled modem to dial into the school for a little while.

I scrapped the Decwriter IV within the last few years (it needed a print
head when I got it... I finally scored one from a friend at DEC who pulled
it off one being scrapped, installed it, then the PSU went out !).

The saddest thing is under pressure from my father (where all the "junk"
was stored) I scrapped the WT/78 and dual 8" floppy drive sets (dumpster).
I only did it because I had no software for it and nothing to do with it.
Then I found out that it is based on PDP8 architecture....  I wish I had
least found it's processor "module" for trinkets collection.... 
It was in immaculate condition as well... looked like a VT52 but was a
word processing station.  This was the predecessor to DECMate as I recall.

I bugged the crap out of one guy once for him to turn his back on a failing
20 Gig external MAC hard drive which I wanted the SCSI case.... finally after
a lot of nagging, he said "you know where it is" (we were not in his office,
and I gladly took the hint, went in his office and took it :-) ).

In retrospect that was too much nagging for too little gain.

In your state YMMV, but it's all in who you know, as if you want anything on
the "up and up", you won't get it till it's antique, can't find software,
parts are rusting, etc....

Best of luck in all hardware hunting....

I'm not an SGI person (just getting into some of the stuff now), but those
Onyx boxes and the price they were obtained for make me drool profusely...

-- Curt


>Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 09:39:25 -0500
>From: Kurt Huhn <kurt at k-huhn.com>
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] You want balls?
>
>Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:
>
>> 
>> I don't know what is up with the Max Impact, but the other two machines
>> haven't been turned on from what I can tell since the MU CS dept moved
>> across campus.  The crime of it all.  Two very nice SGIs sitting there
>> unused for over a year and me with no SGI.
>> 
>
>Time to talk to someone with the authority to release those systems...
>
>-- 
>Kurt
>kurt at k-huhn.com
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