He was swiping them from break area/kitchenettes in different departments and work areas.
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So, NASA got a Cray, and you moved on? Any particular reason?
Frak those Cylons!
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Dave, if we ever meet in person, drinks are on me.
Edit:
Do you sometimes post under a different handle at The Register?
Either way, drinks are still on me.
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I had that on my Win 3.11 machine. I bought it in a brick-and-mortar shop, cash. It came in a cardboard box. It was on a 3.5", plastic cased, magnetic storage medium. It came with a printed manual and some gimmicks. I still must have the biro somewhere, shocking pink with the toasters on it.
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My Dad had a somewhat similar experience: around 1971/72, he was an EE professor working with NASA to try and create a fully automatic computer speech-recognition system for generating transcripts, in real-time, of radio communications between astronauts & ‘CapCom’ on the ground. As part of this, NASA sent him a copy of the complete audio of the then most recent mission (Apollo 15, I think), consisting of hundreds of 7" Ampex reel-to-reel tapes, the most expensive highest-quality of the time, in several packing boxes with the total volume of the average fridge. The project ran its course, and when he was moving out of his office a decade later, he tried to return these tapes (most of them still unsealed)…and when he finally DID get someone at NASA willing to give him a definitive answer, they just laughed and told him, “Toss 'em out.”
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like a certain nasa apollo bag…
I remember wandering around that place as a kid, amazingly fun!
I have a sister who works at the labs there. The Black Hole was one of my regular haunts when we went down to Santa Fe. Really nice and knowledgeable guys there, and you could get all sorts of cool stuff. When my kids were learning about the Manhattan Project, they set us up with some really good meters so we could prospect for uranium, and measure radiation at old mines and test sites. It was a sad day for us when they closed.
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Pittsburg
You may have missed the memo…
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That’d be a good start for a plot:
In the back of someone’s cluttered basement, dusty battered equipment with a NASA label sits. There’s a click, and a red light begin to slowly flash…
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That hier’s experience could be my future. In the late seventies or early eighties, the bank my dad worked for was upgrading from mini-computers to PCs. Comdisco didn’t want the old stuff the bank was leasing back (it was already older stock when my dad’s bank leased it). So my dad and a coworker decided they’d make some cash scrapping the valuable metals within (computers, must be full of gold, right?). They filled our two-car garage with them. Well, there wasn’t a lot valuable metals, but there were endless switches, levers and lights for a ten year old excited about space travel to pretend to fly. Most of them are apart now. We haven’t purchased a machine screw in my family since…
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This is why we still have 200+ reels of audio tape.
A lot of it is still retrievable, by baking it & using a 1" machine in a former engineer’s basement to save to ADAT, which can then be saved digitally. I’m sure something like that procedure is available for tapes that aren’t mouldy.
They should try sending them into one of those VHS-to-DVD conversion services.
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You can de-solder a lot of cool stuff off vintage through-hole boards!
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Haha, send them to drive savers…!
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