Thursday, April 14, 2005

I almost got a hernia for this?

As a Packrat, I love to go to surplus auctions where computers are sold. UK had their surplus auction yesterday, so I was there. A friend of mine and I split the bid on a lot with a couple of Sun Ultras on it, which also had a Dell that I was quite happy to get my hands on. Then I scavanged.

At the UK auction, the surplus people deliberately mix different lots of stuff. A Lexmark Optra R printer (a very nice laser printer of which I have several) can be right beside an IBM PC AT (yes, a REAL AT) or a Macintosh IIsi, or a Pentium 3 desktop. It provides a nice mix of items, and a good mix of bidders. Often, these bidders have only bought a given lot for one or two of the items on it, and they don't care about the rest. One gentleman gave me the SparcStation 20 with memory and a 100Mb Ethernet card that was on his lot. Another gave me 2 Dell GX110s that will be used to make a new database machine. Finally, a fellow gave me a Micron NetFRAME MV6200.

This thing is a monster. I t weighs almost 100 pounds and almost 4 feet deep. I had to carry it out from the auction room to my car, and I could feel my stomach muscles screaming over packing it. I'm surprised something didn't rupture. There was no way it was going into the house, but there are some treasures in it anyway. The memory in it is the same as my new Sun Ultra 5 uses, and the hot-swap SCSI drive bay (full of disks of currently unknown size) will get cut out and put in an old PC case ("frankenDell" anyone ;) ). I even have an order from a co-worker for a "boneyards" Dell. I'll see if anyone locally wants the CPUs (450MHz P2 Xeons) or fans, and the network card is mine. The rest of the sellable parts hit Ebay, and then the rest is either trash or recycled.

Not a bad haul for a half-day's work.

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