[COFF] Re: Typical Fate of Older Hardware

[Grant Taylor via COFF <coff@tuhs.org>]

On 7/29/23 6:26 PM, segaloco via COFF wrote:
> Howdy folks, I wanted to get some thoughts and experiences with regards 
> to what sort of EOL handling of mainframe/mini hardware was typical.

My experience disposing of things is from the late '90s and early '00s 
and is for much smaller things.  So it may very well differ.

But, that being said, I observed basically three different phases of 
hardware divestiture where I was working.

1)  Send everything, effectively donating it, to a municipal / state 
facility that served as a surplus property sale house hosting monthly 
auctions.  --  Conceptually some proceeds supposedly came back to us ... 
eventually.

2)  Per prodding form some of us employees who were interested in 
running some of the things at home persuaded the powers that be to sell 
things through public approved outlets, e.g. GovDeals(.com), where the 
public and employees, could bid on equipment.

The problem was that selling things this way didn't yield enough profit 
to offset the expense of doing so.

3)  The municipality decided that it was more fiscally responsible to 
return to the first method.

> Part of this is to inform what and where to look for old hardware things.

I think that saved searches on typical sites are probably the best 
locations that I've found.  I'd be interested in learning about more.

  - eBay
  - Craigslist
  - Mercari
  - GovDeals

Others suggest:

  - etsy

I was never in geographic proximity to any electronics recycling / 
salvage stores like were so common on the coasts.  The best I had was 
the aforementioned state run surplus auction and others further away.

There is also the very unofficial and always denied "fell off of a 
truck" ostensibly on it's way to aforementioned surplus disposal locations.

> So the details may differ with era, but what I'm curious about is back 
> in the day, when a mainframe or mini was essentially decommissioned, 
> what was more likely to be done with the central unit, and peripherals 
> if they weren't forward compatible with that user's new system.

I've been around a number of locations that retained compatible 
peripherals for as long as they could and as long as they worked. 
Leveraging the existing investment was often a significant influence 
into choosing new systems, at least up to (close to) the replacement 
cost for said peripherals.

> Were machines typically offloaded for money to smaller ops, or was it 
> more common to simply dispose of/recycle components? As a more pointed 
> example, if you worked in a shop that had IBM S/3x0, PDPs, larger 3B 
> hardware, when those fell out of use, what was the protocol for getting 
> rid of it? Were most machines "disposed of" in a complete way, or was it 
> very typical to parts it out first, meaning most machines that reached 
> EOL simply don't exist anymore, they weren't moved as a unit, rather, 
> they're any number of independent parts floating around anywhere from 
> individual collections to slowly decaying in a landfill somewhere.

The other thing that I saw done was businesses holding onto older 
equipment and simply storing it somewhere because divesting it was 
problematic for one reason or another.  So there was usually a room, in 
a basement or attic that collected things.  --  Usually basement as 
heavy things have a natural tendency to go down.  --  Then once every so 
often (3-8 years seemed to be what I saw) the older things in the room, 
if not the entire room, would be purged.  Often unceremoniously and 
without any respect for the equipment.

> Thoughts?

At my last job I whitnessed, and could do nothing to stop, a bunch of 
servers have their hard drives removed, still on the sleds, and 
shredded.  Then the systems they were in were sold at surplus -- again 
for very little money.  The lack of sleds made the systems much less 
usable.  But the business found it to not be worth the time and effort 
to remove the drives from the sleds and return the sleds to the systems 
for resale.

It seems like it really always does come down to what is the most 
economical / least expensive option for businesses.  :-(



Grant. . . .