Once more into the bins

From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
Date: Fri Sep 17 23:39:45 2004

List forgive me, its been two months since I had anything good to confess ...

I finally had some time to spend at a couple of scrap places I like, and it
was both good and bad.

First place is a huge nationwide scrap company with offices in three or
four states, GoldenWest, and in the past a place where I have seen a lot of
decent old iron. Its the place I posted to the list a few months ago that
had the batch tape drives and HP minis. They now have a full time ebay guy
and it looks like the stream of older stuff now goes straight to scrap
without public access.

Second place is much smaller, couple industrial units that are packed to
the top with pallets, taken out and spread all around outside every morning
to sort, and packed back in each night. This one was good for a couple
hours of head down in the bins time, but not much in the "classic" 10+
years old category except for a couple old mac bits (some 9 pin localtalk
adapters, a mac plus numeric keyboard, and some odd bits like big 5 pin
original PC to ps/2 keyboard adapters and extension cables). There were
about 5 gaylords (pallet sized cardboard boxes) of misc circuit boards, and
4,000 small punctures to my fingers later I had a nice pile of video,
network, scsi, and ide cards. Nothing fancy, but a couple nice PCI video
cards for older macs, typical Adaptec 2940, ata66 and ata133 cards, and
quite interesting a handfull of Ati 10/100bt combo fiber cards with various
fiber connections.

I do have a question about one card I saw, but unfortunately missed. A
Nubus card that was full length, but populated sparsely with nothing but 14
to 20 pin dips, Apple branded (sorry didn't write down the number, actually
sorrier I didn't just grab it while it was on top of the heap) and labeled
Bus Master or mastering maybe.

OK, not too exciting or classic, but like I said its been a nasty dry spell.
Received on Fri Sep 17 2004 - 23:39:45 BST