Once more into the bins

From: Joe R. <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sun Sep 19 08:40:39 2004

At 09:39 PM 9/17/04 -0700, you wrote:
>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

   That may be a GOOD thing. I;ve found that E-bay means that they'll
usually hold the stuff ionstead of scrapping it immedaitely. I've also
found that the E-bay guys don't usually bother with the old stuff since
they don't know what it is so there's a good chance you can buy it from
them. The E-bay'ers also don't usually don't want to fool with the big iron
so again there's a good chance you can get it for little of nothing.


>and it looks like the stream of older stuff now goes straight to scrap
>without public access.

   That's an issue that you'll have to work on. I'm allowed into several
places that don't normally allow outsiders in. I'm allowed in because (1)
I never steal anythiing (2) I don't tear things up to get one small part
(3) I don't make a mess. Any one of those will get you kicked out in the
blink of an eye.

   Joe


>
>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 Sun Sep 19 2004 - 08:40:39 BST