Last week's haul & some questions

From: Mzthompson_at_aol.com <(Mzthompson_at_aol.com)>
Date: Tue Aug 15 15:58:15 2000

A few weeks ago I got a call from a company (I know a lot of the
folks there) saying they wanted to get rid of the DEC library.
That amounted to a carload of books and tapes. I asked if they
were getting rid of the books, then what about the equipment.
They said as soon as the paperwork comes through. Later I sent
them an email asking that they not tear down the equipment, but
rather let me know as soon as possible and I will tear it down
and have it out of their way pronto. That way I could make notes
as what goes with what. They agreed.

When I went in to get the equipment last week, they had left the
stuff intact and went even one better. They ran a printout of
DEC stuff off their inventory database and handed that to me.
They also took digital photos of the equipment showing all the
cabling, printed those and handed them to me also. They also
pulled all the boxes of DEC spares, cables, adapters, etc. and
set them out for me. This beats dumpster diving to hell & back.

Books - A complete set of Ultrix books & a few hardware manuals.
When I picked up the equipment they allowed me to rummage through
their library and snatch any DEC manuals they had overlooked earlier.

DEC Eq. - Some 5000's (/133 & /200), a couple DS3100, 8 expansion
boxes containing 9 RZ drives and 4 tape drives, and associated
keyboards, mice and cables.

Q: The 5000/133 has the space to mount a couple RX2x drives. Of
course I need mounting brackets. I thought I would try to locate
a couple before concocting my own. Anybody got a part number for
that mounting bracket, or any clues as to where you can locate
things like this? I can scrounge the equipment, but the piddly
stuff like this and some cables are often harder to find.

Non DEC - They decided to get rid of another box. It is a tape
duplicator, and at first was skeptical of hauling home something
that may prove more hassles than worth. After opening it up, I
went tee-hee tee-hee. It is a tower case, only BIG. Has a
20 slot ISA-AT bus, one of those industrial strength jobs. In
that is a 386/33 CPU board, a couple I/O boards and I believe
multiple SCSI cards. There is a Seagate ST21400 hard drive in
the bottom. Out front is the drive bays with room for 11 half
height drives. Mounted there is two TZ30's, two 1/4" cartridge
drives 525mb, and two drives which I think are 8mm, and 1 lowly
3.5 floppy. On the back are: 5 pin Din, 9 pin serial, and 15 pin
video connector. With that I then realized this is nothing more
than a big Intel box, probably loaded with MS-DOS, maybe Windows,
and apparently the software needed to duplicate multiple tape
formats. The latest date code I could find was '95. I have not
fired it up yet, but this may prove to be a nice box to have around.

The catch is no documentation. In fact I can not even find a
model/serial no tag on it anywhere. All I know is that it was
made by a outfit called Duplication Technology, located in Boulder.

(1 hour later)

Darn, I love this technology. A web search yield a phone no that
led to a gal who knew the history of the original company, and who
gave another phone no. That led to the engineer in another company
who put this thing together. I gave him the name of the company
(back when it was purchased) and he pulled it up on his database and
rattled the specs. No model/serial because each was custom built for
the customer.

The two drives in question are indeed 8mm, but only support the 8200
format. Can anybody enlighten me on that, who used that format, etc.

The kicker was that he offered me $75-100 ea for some of the drives.
His stock to support legacy systems is dwindling.

Mike
Received on Tue Aug 15 2000 - 15:58:15 BST