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

[Loomis, Rip]

Dammit!  Wish my timing had been better...
Missed meeting you Ken, since Zach (with his family)
and I were both over at Dave's and Mike's on Friday
PM.  The most notable event of the night (other than
the warehouse, the three Cray's, Mike's home network,
and the MB ex-German-Army truck in the driveway) was
watching Dave flip the switches on the PDP-8 (?) he's
cleaning up and getting it to start incrementing the
accumulator while displaying the accum to the
blinken lights.

I had forgotten that computers could be that much
fun!  I need a bigger house...

Ken, if you (or anyone else) has 128MB DSIMMs for
USPARC boxen, please drop me a line with a cost--
my 170E is hungry and other systems here can use
the 64MB DSIMMs that are currently filling it.

Now to figure out when I can take Dave (and Mike)
out for Thai, and whether Chem/Bio/RadCon gear
will be required...

  --Rip

(And for Shawn asking about Comdisco's site, it's
www.comdisco.com but the part you really want is
accessed by going to "Buy/Sell" and then "IT
Equipment", or
 
http://marketplace.comdisco.com/servlet/sis/cm/Login/Html/LoginFrames.html?C
atalog=ITCAP )

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ken Hansen [mailto:Ken.Hansen at ICTI-USA.com]
> Sent: Monday, 09 July, 2001 14:02
> To: 'rescue at sunhelp.org'
> Subject: [rescue] Report from Laurel,MD trip and a note to those of us
> *selling* i tems on eBay...
> 
> 
> 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) 
> _______________________________________________
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