[rescue] another sandia/los Alamos auction

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Friday 13 February 2004 20:46, Dan Sikorski wrote:
> Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > lately than Sun stuff.  I've got a pair of desktop 66MHz Power2
> > boxes (3CT's) and my friend has a couple of frames worth of MCA SP
> > (but only one cabinet and no switch...for now ;).
>
> I picked up all sorts of stuff from salvage when i was there. 
> Sparc5's, a pair of ultra1's for $5 each (!!!) that continue to work
> flawlessly. Sgi O2, Onyx, a pair of quad-ppro machines, HP Visualize
> c180, nCUBE/2, ss670, a sun rack, many monitors, the list goes on and
> on...

Hrm.  I paid $12 each for my pair of U1e-167's.   They work, but I 
haven't used them much.  I "picked up" a Sequent NUMA-Q machine that 
had a pair of PIII Xeon's for very cheap... but stuff like that is the 
stuff I end up selling to pay for the stuff I want to keep. :)

> Your friend had that SP on ebay didn't he...   I was interested in
> it, but backed out because it didn't have the switch.  He also had a
> NCR worldmark that he was looking to unload, iirc.  Does he still
> have it?

Yep.  I'm doubtful he'll get rid of either one, as the only reason he 
wanted to get rid of the SP is because it didn't have the switch.  For 
some reason, our department wants to keep multiple spare SP switches 
when they're worth on the order of $200-$300.  Sigh.  

> I'm sure you also saw the CDC Cyber 205 out there.  I have one of the
> two name plates off of it.  Would you by chance the the person who
> has the other?  Dave McGuire wanted that machine badly, but it was
> being scrapped before he knew it was even there.

Yep.  I've borrowed it to scan it - a guy "at work" has it and is 
unlikely to give it up anytime soon.  The salvage op actually had to 
bid on that machine to get it, btw, they paid about $10k for it... and 
they've easily made up for that + the time to disassemble it by 
reselling it for the gold and other stuff in it.  Personally, I don't 
mind too much because they aren't really that well funded, and if they 
hadn't done they, it might be difficult to impossible to get other 
stuff out of there for cheaply.  Yeah, it sucks from a "preservation" 
stand point, but I think overall more good than bad has ended up coming 
out of it... unless Dave was willing to post the $20k+ that they 
probably made off of it in scrap value.

> >I'm still waiting for a PDP-8 to show up out there, but I'm not too
> >hopeful.  From Dave's pictures, I think his 3 (that he was willing
> > to put in the picture!) are emitting gravity waves which are
> > pulling them away from here, towards Florida.
>
> You never know what they'll find someday when they decide to clean
> out the basement of some of the buildings on campus....

They do that every so often.  The summer after my freshman year here, 
there was a *pristine* VAX 11/780 sitting in the hallway of the 
basement of Physics for a while.  If I'd had a clue back then, or 
somewhere to put it, I'd have grabbed it.  It ended up getting brought 
out to salvage and tossed off the back of the truck straight onto the 
scrap heap.  ("Why would anyone want that old thing?!?")  I like to 
think that I've helped sway them away from scrapping some things since 
I've started going there..

> If you find some good things out there, and care to share, I have no
> problem taking a trip down there.  Actually, i've been thinking of
> going down there in one of the next few weekends, i've really been

If you're coming down, let me know, I'd be glad to meet up with you.  
However, they're definately on "clean out" mode on the place, and 
there's not been much of any worth that's gone out there in the past 
month or two.

> itching for a Kansas City Brisket sandwitch from the South Street
> Smokehouse.  (if you haven't been there, GO NOW!*)

I haven't gone before, but I've thought about it before.  Is it really 
as good as the BBQ around Kansas City?   There's a "very southern BBQ" 
chain in KC that has the absolute best BBQ I've ever had.  Nothing else 
I've had comes close to it.  Damn, I wish I remembered the name of it.

Pat
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