Question about a system

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Wed Mar 22 21:37:24 2000

Well 6000's seem to be appearing in the scrap market here in the Bay Area
and the most I've seen one go for so far was about $75/cabinet (1 6000/300
+ 1 expansion cabinet for $150)

At 09:05 PM 3/22/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Consider the following machine:
> VAX6000/400
> 3 x HSC70
> 2 x TU79
> 11 x Exsys disk drives
> 6 x Microtech disk drives
>
> o How big is this machine?

The CPU/Memory/I/O is refrigerator sized, probably one cabinet, may be two.

Each HSC70 is probably 4' tall, 3' deep and 2' wide. Don't have a picture
handy of the TU79 but is probably a rack sized unit. The Exsys disk drives
I don't know. If they are in something like a storage works cabinet they
will be a 6' rack with a channel controller and a bunch of disk trays.
Figure you've got at least 6 racks worth of gear here.

> o How much might it originally have gone for?

Half a million? (Wild guess!)

> o What might it be worth now?

Depends of course. For immediate sale, probably between $200 and $1000 for
the resellers, however be prepared for them to ask you to pull all the
boards and ship those and push the rest into a deep lake somewhere. If
someone had a "dead" 6000 with Mission Critical Apps on it, you could
probably squeeze $10,000 out of them :-).

Perhaps one of the DEC resellers on the list will pipe in with the current
asking price in the DDA for replacement boards and/or systems.

>I know someone who has such a machine and is trying to sell it, but
>I suspect that he is expecting a LOT more for it than it may be
>worth nowadays... it is 10-12 years old and he recently had it at
>auction on eBay for a minimum bid of $10000... I gather it did not
>get any bids...

$10,000 is _waaaaaay_ optimistic.
--Chuck
Received on Wed Mar 22 2000 - 21:37:24 GMT