[COFF] Re: Typical Fate of Older Hardware

[steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au>]

Matt,

You ask _great_ questions.

How far back are you talking?
I think drawing a time box (start, end) around what you collect
would give you returns.

There’s a central problem:

	there’s no money in old gear,
	while storage costs mount over time.

i.e. Who’s Going to Fund You?	[ Midnight Oil: Who’s Going to Save You? ]
It comes down to individuals keeping relics and privately funding collections.

Some manufacturers had museums, archives & collections,
but those were broken up when companies closed / merged.
There’s a famous archive collection that was lost due to wild fires…

Gordon Bell points out that in 1984, there were 91 US Computer Manufacturers.
Of them, in 1990 IBM & HP  plus DEC & Data General) were left.
 [ MIPS, SGI, SUN & a host of others using RISC came & went over 1-2 decades ]

In 2000, just IBM & HP left from 1984, with computing being excised from HP at some point.

IBM survived 1991/ 92 after declaring the largest corporate losses in US history, to the time.
I think there’s around 10,000 IBM mainframes left now.
Conversely, the number of running ‘instances’ continues to grow 
while physical machines & sites keep dwindling. 
Specialists firms now host many mainframes.

The real US experts are CHM, whom you already know.
	<https://computerhistory.org>

This is the Aussie version - which has had problems with keeping its physical collection.
They’d been given ‘cheap’ (free) storage space, then the owners developed the site.

	<https://acms.org.au>

A useful research project would be to compile a definitive list :)

	<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_museums>

The collective noun / Industry Term for obsolete equipment used to be “boat anchor”.
Finding old pieces of historic machines is hard. They’re big & often fragile.

Older (60’s & 70’s) gear was worth crushing & extracting the gold & copper.
That happened to a system I once worked on - it took a whole floor of an exchange :-/

I was asked in the mid 1980’s about reusing chips from a later model IBM 370 (40xx?).
A friend’s company was upgrading all it gear after _3_ years.
They got a quote for removal - it was worth less than nothing, 
they had to pay to have it removed & broken down. As a Mech-Eng, he couldn’t believe it.
He took it for the steel cabinets & dumped the electronics.

Remember that floor space, volume, power (kW), environment/ HVAC shrunk significantly over time
and various types of equipment & media stopped being used:
	cards, paper tape, 1/2” mag tape, disk packs…

There’s no point in keeping old media if you can’t read the data therein,
and older peripherals aren’t “free” - you’ve got to keep old machines that can attach to them.
Which costs space, power and maintenance and sometimes important data is accidentally ‘orphaned’.

For “Sound & Film”, Australia keeps a national archive and is in a constant race against time
transferring content from old media to current.
The problem once was unstable “nitrate” film stock, now it’s 2” tape masters :(

	<https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/using-collection/film-australia-collection>

While MIPS, GB & TB expanded, LAN’s and affordable networks gave us workstations & much more.
There’s many generations of superseded kit, data and software to choose from :)

There may have been 60,000 PDP-11’s produced and some were kept running for decades commercially.
Old, rusting hulks might be sitting in the corner of factories & barns still
	- the same as vintage cars sitting ’somewhere’, rusting away.

Australia has the “Honour” of still having the only complete pre-1950 valve computer known.

It was built in Sydney & used there from 1949 to 1955, then moved to Melbourne in 1956 & used until 1964.

It was then put in storage & mostly forgotten about until 1996, when it was made to work again.
It was put on display for a few years. Not quite bureaucratic “benign neglect”, but close.

	<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC>

CSIRAC’s 1953 replacement at Sydney Uni ran until 1963, then was ‘broken up’.
	<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILLIAC>

All the best in your quest - it’s a great question.

I hope others can give you better, more concrete leads in where to find “Old Electronics Kit”.
It might be OK to drive around the country side looking for old cars rusting in fields or barns,
but that’s not going to work for old electronics.
People simply won’t know what they’re looking at when ‘cleaning out’ an old house,
they won’t understand that some of the items have value to collectors.

I’ve seen this with my own family. The Big Clean Out was unplanned & hurried.
Some people took stuff they thought might be valuable, but making a buck was the motive.
A bunch of working electronics was tossed in the ’skip’ (dumpster), not even recycled.

Ken Thompson wrote he once got interested in player pianos and discovered there’s a firm
somewhere in the USA that has a large collection and will restore items on demand.

There might be people that curate & repair Old Electronics in the same way.


all my best
steve j

=================

	The Last of the First, CSIRAC: Australia’s First Computer
		<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/3775482/the-last-of-the-first-csirac-ebook.pdf>

	While other first generation computers around the world were being shut down and dismantled, 
	CSIRAC at the University of Melbourne began a ser- viceable second life. 

	Further engineering improvements were gradually incorporated into CSIRAC during its time in Melbourne.
	 For a further 8 years CSIRAC functioned as an open-shop computing service and during this period, 
		from June 1956 to June 1964, 
	CSIRAC was switched on for about 30,000 hours 
	and processed about 700 computing projects. 

	Total maintenance time was approximately 10% of switch-on time.

	At the time of CSIRAC’s shutdown in November 1964 it was already recognised by its operators to be an historically important technological artefact. 
	This realisation was probably the major factor that contributed towards its preservation. 

	Most other first generation electronic computers were dismantled and scrapped.
	In most cases only a few minor artefacts remain extant. 

	Although Museum Victoria accepted CSIRAC for its collection the computer was never put on public display.
	Its sheer bulk, and the relative drabness of its exterior, mitigated against it being easily placed in any exhibition.

	From 1964 to 1980 it was kept in storage at the museum’s warehouse at Abbotsford where it was only sighted by staff and a few enthusiasts.

	In 1980, Gerry Maynard, then Head of the Department of Electronic Data Processing at Caulfield, 
	decided it would be an appropriate tribute to Trevor Pearcey to have CSIRAC placed on display at Caulfield.

	Arrangements were made to move the computer from Museum Victoria to the Caulfield campus.
	Assembly was supervised by John Daly. 
	From 1980 to 1992 CSIRAC remained on show at Caulfield and was a popular public attraction on Open Days.

	In September 1992 the computer was returned to Museum Victoria (Scienceworks),
		but once again was placed in storage,
		this time at a museum store in Maribyrnong.

	While in storage there, CSIRAC, in January 1995, was lucky to survive a flood of the Maribyrnong River. 
	Water reached the base of the computer but fortunately no damage was done.

=================

> On 30 Jul 2023, at 09:26, segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> 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. Part of this is to inform what and where to look for old hardware things.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> My fear is that the latter was more common, as that's what I've seen in my lab days; old instrumentation wasn't just auctioned off or otherwise gotten rid of complete, we'd typically parts the things out resulting in a chassis and some of the paneling going in one waste stream, unsalvageable parts like burnt out boards going in another, and anything reusable like ribbon cables and controller boards being stashed to replace parts on their siblings in the lab. I dunno if this is apples to oranges though because the main instruments I'm thinking of, the HP/Agilent 5890, 6890, and 7890 series, had different lifespan expectations than computing systems had, and share a lot more of the under the hood components like solenoids and gas tubing systems, so that may not be a good comparison, just the closest one I have from my own personal experience.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> - Matt G.

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

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