Houston Computer Museum liquidation July 24th

[DougM]

Anyone go and see all they have? If so, any Heathkit 8-bit items? I'm about 3 hours away, might be tempted to drive there if there is any of that.

If you go, and there's paper tape related items, please let me know.

(Anything that can reasonably be boxed up and shipped, no terminals, etc. )

 

[VERAULT]

I think some photos were redundant, but I tried to take pictures of as much as I could.

Yeah, loading up the trailer was f**king MISERABLE. I had to contend with 90%+ humidity and temps of 80-95 degrees during several thunderstorms - this building had NO air circulation. Couple that with a even a milder case of hyperhidrosis, and yeah - heat stroke ruins your day. That's why I posted a picture of a cooler. Got smart and packed some light snacks, water, Body Armor and straight unflavored Pedialyte - and spaced all of them out.

I really had several motives in mind - I obviously collect this stuff and have since high school. But my primary business is also reselling this stuff, so I added some things to my collection, got a bunch of stuff for resale (I actually spent about $7000 with the guy who was running things in the end, excluding my time, hotel stays, diesel fuel and storage totes, and made that money back in a few months), and saved lots of things from the dump. I saved either a Sun ELC or SLC from getting trashed (it was in the trash pile because of MASSIVE broken plastic and supposedly didn't power on - I haven't powered it up yet, but that might be something I bring to VCFSW to sell), the chassis for a MIPS (he sold the boards, but left the case, which I saved (who knows what condition it's in as it's outside and tarped the last three years) and hard drive that's since been removed and put into dry storage. Let's see - documentation for lots of rare/obscure systems. Unusual cables, several Intel InBoard 386 cards (and other 8088 upgrade cards) for $2.00 apiece, etc. Got a steal on a DEC 4000 VLC along with two other DEC items I sold - $100 in total. The 4000 VLC I'm keeping (it feels like a SPARCstation IPC in speed, but it's a cute little machine). TONS of CRTs as y'all can see. I might post photos of them on here at some point, as I'd love to sell the CRTs between $25 and $75 each (saved some BNC as well as what I felt were obscure CRTs). Got tons of 5151 and 5153 CRTs with various degrees of case damage, but unknown if they power on. I'm trying to think what else. The software room (room with lots of boxes scattered all over the floor) - I ended up picking through for things I thought was worth saving, and in the end, ended up getting about 98% of it (with the bulk of it being free). Picked up a bunch of old luggables that I think set me back $200 or so? Some Columbia Data Systems, Corona, Compaq Portable (the original), some II's, some III 286's (with plasma screens), Zenith, etc. We're three years later and I'm STILL going through things, photographing and listing on ebay or finding things to complement my own collection. And here I thought Computer Reset was a goldmine (I picked up an Option/370 from CR that went in my 5170 AT - cool, but otherwise useless).

What would you say was the best piece you got while there; the one that made it all worth it?

 

[pkhoury]

If you go, and there's paper tape related items, please let me know.

(Anything that can reasonably be boxed up and shipped, no terminals, etc. )

Oh, it's already long gone. I really wanted to go back one last time back in August 2021, but I got rear ended on my last trip by, well, we'll just say Florida Man and his female partner. That was a disaster - I was doing about 55 and was suddenly doing 63 when their Mercedes Sprinter hit me from behind around 4am-ish.

 

[pkhoury]

What would you say was the best piece you got while there; the one that made it all worth it?

That's really hard to say. I was super happy to get the Sun 3/60's I'd bought there, as I'd been looking for one since I lost my own around 2004. Really, it was like the same treasure hunt at Computer Reset, though I probably spent more time there acquiring things than CR (despite being on the volunteer team for a few months). The DEC 4000 VLC was pretty cool. I don't know if there was a single thing that made it all worth it, per se. I know my late best friend picked up a Power Computing Mac Clone from both there and Computer Reset, which I reacquired when another friend and I went 60/40 on his estate (and I demoed it at our club's last meetup). As you could see, there was just SO MUCH STUFF!

 

[Al Kossow]

did you save all of the ibm manuals? PXL_20210804_013019765.jpg

 

[pkhoury]

Scrapping is recycling. Scrapyards don't take things just to drop them in a hole in the ground. It takes away the readily reusable stuff and then, moves the rest down the food chain. If the entire "thing" isn't simply buried in a landfill, but has gone through some process (however you call it) where something has been extracted before the rest has been put in the landfill, then some portion of it has been recycled and reused. Just not in its original form.

Cars are scrapped and have an entire lifecycle of processing before the remains are eventually buried. In the UK they have to recover 95% of the cars weight.

More like recovering for valuable materials, too. There are different degrees of it. I bought a lot of things for resale from a friend's business in California that did e-waste recycling. Got lots of treasures for my own collection, too, like some Lear Siegler ADM3 terminals (one works, the other doesn't) for $25. Some things I'm sure ended up in China, like gaylords full of hard drives, RAM, motherboards, etc - which is either recycled, or resold because of their intrinsic value to collectors or otherwise, other things get melted down for precious metals, etc.

 

[pkhoury]

did you save all of the ibm manuals? PXL_20210804_013019765.jpg

I did, and I'm embarrassed to say that some of them got destroyed recently, when my dairy goats figured out how to breach that area. The original goal was to find someone to archive as much of them as possible. My late best friend and I didn't have the time/resources to do it ourselves. I still have MANY banker boxes of the IBM documentation that I'd love to either sell or donate, as yes, it should be preserved. In the end, NOBODY wanted it, so I took it all.

 

[pkhoury]

did you save all of the ibm manuals? PXL_20210804_013019765.jpg

Actually - you've bought several things from me on ebay, and I think I asked you specifically if you wanted some of these. The problem is getting totes to put them in and take them to you in San Jose. I might make a trip to Nor Cal in the next few months, weather depending (I usually travel with the dog shown in my avatar, but German Shepherds don't do so well in 90+ degree California heat).

 

[NeXT]

I did indeed get a keypunch out of that location and it was absolutely dirty but I'm seriously questioning what the hell happened to get mold in the walls like that. I didn't find water damage in it.

 

[pkhoury]

I did indeed get a keypunch out of that location and it was absolutely dirty but I'm seriously questioning what the hell happened to get mold in the walls like that. I didn't find water damage in it.

That place was f**king nasty! Not as bad as CR, but still... and there was no forced air ventilation, added to the humidity and storms Houston sees that time of year. There were a few instances I had no lighting because of severe thunderstorms, and wished I'd brought in an industrial fan to at least get the air circulating. Live and learn.

Regarding your username - I did find a single NeXT monitor there, though someone in our retro group expressed interest in it (thankfully). I'm not too keen on shipping any CRTs.

 

[VERAULT]

Hope you all wore masks (black mold can cause lots of health problems and can take a while to manifest).

 

[wperko]

Hi,

How many of these "museums" have gone under and sold off all the donated equipment in the last several years? I've seen at least five museum sales between eBay and VCFed.


.

 

[pkhoury]

Hope you all wore masks (black mold can cause lots of health problems and can take a while to manifest).

This place? No. Computer Reset - sometimes. Electronics Plus in Kerrville, TX? OH YES! I helped liquidate that, also in 2021 (mix of newer e-waste and some vintage stuff), and it was affected by burst pipes from the well publicized hard freeze we had in Texas in 2021. That place was NASTY. I think I was able to do without masks a month or so into it after the place aired out, but yeah - 95% of the time, we had N95 masks on.

 

[pkhoury]

Hi,

How many of these "museums" have gone under and sold off all the donated equipment in the last several years? I've seen at least five museum sales between eBay and VCFed.


.

Good question. I personally only know about CR, the Houston Museum, and the electronics/computer reseller I helped liquidate/close. I also bought a bunch of stuff from a gentleman in upstate New York in 2020 (fulfilled a bunch of my collection goals with that haul) - a friend of a friend's mother's son died, and she said he could have all his computer stuff if he cleaned it out. This guy was literally sitting on a gold mine. Picked up a SPARCstation 20 with quad Ross HyperSPARC 125's for $100 (and 9 other SS20s in other conditions), a bunch of PDP-11's/microVAX in BA23 chassis, some PS/2 Model 60/80 systems, an Okistation that I need to photograph and post on here (keeping that), two DEC AlphaStation 200's for $100 each (keeping both of those, too), some free Sun Trinitron CRTs, a DEC DigiREP, and some other things. Some of the BA23 chassis were empty (and neither of us knew what they were worth), so he threw in an IMSAI 8080 for the cost of shipping (also in my permanent collection).