[rescue] Lightening the load

[James Birdsall]

I have dozens of machines that I've been hauling around for years, some 
of them more than a decade. I don't think of them as being that old -- I 
remember when they came out, or at least when they were still on the 
price sheet -- but it's time to admit that many of them are 20+ years 
old. The ones that still work, and I bet that at least some of them 
still do, are just as capable as they were, but expectations have risen 
around them.

So, assuming I ever get the time to work on them, which seems like a big 
if when some of them have been untouched for ten years, I'm left with 
the question: what then? I'm still doing some hosting at home, but 
that's another archaism: the fastest outbound connection I can get is 
slower than the average consumer inbound connection. It's fine for old 
text-based stuff, but isn't really sufficient for anything else. I 
should just rent a server in a datacenter somewhere. And outside of 
hosting, I really don't have anything that these machines could do which 
would justify the power, noise, and heat load of running them. It's time 
for them to go to somebody who has the time to play with them, if 
nothing else.

I'm starting with my 680x0-based machines, which is especially painful 
because that includes the Sun 3/60, my first love. I may still end up 
keeping one of them, but the rest should go. I have Sun 3 pizza boxes, 
VME cards and cages, a pile of HP 9000/3xx machines and parts, plus a 
couple Mac IIci and parts and some MVME68K stuff. What I don't really 
have is time: I may be able to catalog it some weekend, but I don't know 
about shipping it. I sure don't have time to see what works and doesn't. 
If things go really sour, I might be stuck just cramming it all in a 
truck and taking it down to RePC for recycling.

Is there anybody in the Seattle area who would be interested in taking 
this stuff?