[rescue] Worst rescue [was MY coolest rescue ever, nCUBE2]

[Scott Newell]

I don't really have a favorite best rescue, but I do recall one deal I wish
I'd passed on:

DRMO had a mess of Intergraph Interpro 125 and 250s out in the warehouse,
and several sealed bid auctions went by with no activity on them.  I
figured that they'd probably be loaded with ram, and might have a decent
drive as well.  I fully expected any data files to be wiped, if not the
whole drive.  Put in the min bid of $25 (or was it $40?) at the next
auction and ended up with a 125, 20" monitor, keyboard, and a short RJ-45
patch cord.  Sure enough, the drive had been wiped, the mobo was serialized
(no cloned OS would work), Intergraph wouldn't discuss an OS without a very
expensive maintenance contract, no alternative free source OS was (or is?)
available, and the monitor was fixed frequency.

I managed to find a recycler that wanted to remove the ram chips from the
memory board, so I used a jigsaw (!) to saw off the memory section from the
relevant boards.  I then proceded to strip most of the logic boards with a
hot-air gun.  The recycler had offered something like $200 for the ram (32
MB, I think), but re-nigged when he saw that they were not fast page or
some other nonsense.  Argh.

I gave away the monitor to someone who couldn't use it either, stuck the
5.25" drive in the closet, tossed the case, put the clipper CPU in the
drawer, and cursed my own foolishness.  Oh, and the 80186 from the network
board never made it into any homebrew embedded project because it was in a
LCC package, and the required socket cost more than the processor.

I'm still using the RJ-45 patch cord--it turned out to be the most
expensive 6 foot cable I own!

What y'all's worst rescue story?


newell