Kaypro Damage by Local Government - is it just an Australian thing?

[cj7hawk]

So there's this weird thing the government(s) do in Australia. They send someone around prior to clean-up day cutting the power cables and any other cables they can find on any old computers or electrical items you might be discarding...

And that's how I got my latest machine... One of the ones I swore never to buy again in my new years resolutions... In fairness, it did take a week for me to break my resolution, it's not like I ordered it Jan1.

That aside, it was clear someone just left this out on the verge to be smashed into landfill, and a junk collector picked it up, and somewhere it changed hands a few times and then I payed a kings ransome for it on Ebay. Around USD$300 before shipping.

And all the cables were cut... So I just rewired the thing, tried out my new Greaseweasel setup with a 1.2Mb drive strapped down to pretend it's a very narrow track 360K and....

The screen came up and the image booted! I was very surprised. I had to disassemble the whole thing to check it was set to 240v and the capacitors all looked very nice, but still I want to get back to the wires... Is there any parallel anywhere in the world where local government hires agents to go around sabotaging electrical equipment for the sole purpose of harming second hand computer collectors ( and electrical items second hand sales? )

I know this sounds a bit weird, but it's actually extremely common here in Australia.

The backstory is some local government ( like a county ) got upset that some bloke gives this old block an empty bottle from the boot of his car at the rubbish tip. So they record his rego, chase him down, arrest him and charge this bloke with theft for asking some other guy if he could have the empty bottle in the boot of his car. Yeah, we get assholes like that in Australia who have nothing better to do than prosecute pensioners so they can justify letting criminals loose in our community... I wish I was just making this stuff up.

Anyway, old bloke has never had as much as a traffic fine in his life... And now he's a convicted criminal... But he's old and cashed up, so he appeals, loses, appeals again, loses, then takes it to the high court ( like the main US court ) appeals, wins, and we get one of the few rights we have in Australia - the right to collect stuff that people chuck out for the councils to pick up... And the councils lost big time, because they used to prosecute people for this act.

So anyway, now the councils can't prosecute people for junk collecting anymore, so we get computers that people throw out can be legally picked up off the side of the road and resold. Except for these asshole rangers who go around cutting the power cords and any other cord they can find, for the sole reason of sabotaging stuff. In an effort to punish junk collectors.

Does that happen in the US too? Or is it just an Australian thing? There's literally an army of saboteurs employed in local governments across the entire country. It just seems like one of those bizarre things we accept as normal and most people who don't collect old stuff might not even notice the rangers going door to door cutting cords.

Anyway, I had a power socket for a c13 plug with all the wires, so stuck it in place of the mangled wires... And after checking everything was OK, was really surprised that it actually booted right up - even my blind disk burning went well... Which does bring me to a second question. Should the Kaypro disk light stay on after the prompt comes up?

Sorry for the long post... Here's an ASCII potato....[[POTATO]]

 

[cjs]

I wouldn't say it's hugely frequent, but here in Japan I do regularly see old equipment on Yahoo Auctions that has had the power cord cut off. I don't know who's doing it, but I suspect it's just because they no longer trust it not to electrocute people, and if the cord's been cut off and you electrocute yourself after connecting a new one, that's clearly your fault, not the fault of the previous owner who tried to "protect" you.

But I've never seen anybody cutting off printer cables or anything like that. Then again, the only captive cables I've ever seen were the video input cable on monitors.

 

[cj7hawk]

I've seen council workers do it before and it never made sense so I usually assume they are always guilty, but looking it up, I saw a few people mentioning that sometimes junk collectors do it too. The rationale seems to be they have enough of the item themselves, and so want to prevent other junk collectors from picking it up and selling it in competition to what they have...

Cutting any kind of power cord is dangerous though because kids will pick them up and wire them up if they think the item is worth keeping... Not a safe outcome.

But I have seen someone going door to door doing it in the usualy council wear some time ago.

I guess the only good thing about it is that at least if a computer makes it to ebay like that, it's a pretty good indication no one has tried to power it on since it was found.

Do you get kerbside rubbish collectors in Japan? It always seems like a country that would be a little too neat to allow that?

 

[Robbbert]

I've never heard of that. You put the junk out to be collected, ask the council to take it away and they do. In the meantime if someone finds something then they can take it away (I don't know if it's legal, but I don't see a problem with doing that - less landfill would seem to be a good idea).

I know in QLD a second-hand dealer is supposed to cut the cord off before selling an old electrical product, although again I don't know why.

 

[Svenska]

I know this as a liability thing. In my world, old furniture and electronics is often thrown away by putting it on the side-walk on a specific day, and eventually the trashing company (or someone else) takes a truck and takes them in for proper disposal. City guidelines vary a bit, but it's quite common.

But until it is taken, it is still your stuff. Which means it is your responsibility to prevent avoidable accidents until then. If someone steals the stuff and electrocutes himself, you are still liable. Cutting the power cords is a fast and easy solution, and understood by everyone. (One can no longer claim "avoidable accident" after having spent effort to repair the device in question.) Of course, you are not to leave the cut off cord next to the device.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar rules exist for local governments, i.e. accidents caused by their trash are their liability. So they make sure that harm can only come through deliberate actions, not accidents.

 

[westveld]

Is the US:

I've seen plenty of cords cut off, but usually by the owner or scrappers.

To scrap the copper, protect from liability, or a safety concern.

I could see an argument for the liability/safety - if something is sitting out in the rain, might not be ideal for a random bloke to take it home and plug it in.
Do you have council meetings?

Could be interesting to go to one and ask nicely

A google turns up this for the US:

The United States Supreme Court in 1988 ruled that household garbage is public property once it's on the curb. That enables police to search trash for criminal evidence, but that protection hasn't always been extended to people who collect recyclables

 

[cj7hawk]

The United States Supreme Court in 1988 ruled that household garbage is public property once it's on the curb. That enables police to search trash for criminal evidence, but that protection hasn't always been extended to people who collect recyclables

It was always considered Public Property in Australia, hence once you put it out, it was considered the government's. But the interesting thing about public property that no one owns and the government has not claimed is that anyone can claim it.

It was a pretty interesting case - the kind that should never go to court... And I bet the councils involved wish they had never taken the matter further. Then they decided that ownership is not a forever thing in common law and you can "Abandon" stuff. Once abandoned, anyone can own it if it's on public property, but it requires *interaction* - that is, if you leave stuff on public property for the government to collect, anyone can collect it since title does not exist until you claim it, and to do that, you have to do something with it, such as take it home. As long as the intent to abandon was formed by the previous owner, an item can then be owned by anyone.

The exception was when the intent to abandon in a different way is formed, such as personal items, which you have to store within your property until someone comes to collect them.

Or when an item was not abandoned, nor could someone reasonably believe an intent to abandon the item was formed, eg, finding a handbag full of money - it is unlikely the owner abandoned it.

But a pile of rubbish on clean-up day? Yep, that counts as abandoned. There's also a right that junk collectors have to make a living that can't be infringed, now also one of the few rights we have in Australia.

I wonder how many old computers get saved that way? I'm reasonably certain quite a few items I get have been sitting in a pile of junk from their condition.

 

[Zare]

Here it's a public property too - if it's dangerous or hazardous the blame is on whoever left it there.
The council has spots where you can leave "bigger waste" once a week so the city clean service picks it off.

Usually people dump everything including construction material so this places are full of glass, nails, wood bits, everything. You can even find old CRT TVs with open or broken case with cascade and other HV parts exposed.

 

[cjs]

Do you get kerbside rubbish collectors in Japan? It always seems like a country that would be a little too neat to allow that?

I am one! My office chair is one I grabbed from the kerb of the next-door building when it was put out for sodai gomi ("oversized rubbish"), which requires you to buy a special sticker to put on it and put it out on an arranged day for the oversized rubbish collectors to pick up.

That said, I don't think it's a particularly common thing. Anything with any value at all can be given to a recycle shop (or sometimes even sold to them), and they will come pick up stuff from your home unless it's total trash.

 

[NeXT]

I am one! My office chair is one I grabbed from the kerb of the next-door building when it was put out for sodai gomi ("oversized rubbish"), which requires you to buy a special sticker to put on it and put it out on an arranged day for the oversized rubbish collectors to pick up.

That said, I don't think it's a particularly common thing. Anything with any value at all can be given to a recycle shop (or sometimes even sold to them), and they will come pick up stuff from your home unless it's total trash.

I noticed that!
Multiple times while I was walking around I noticed something curbed and either it had a unique tag attached to it or it was in a large clear bag with the tag used to close off the bag. I assumed it was some sort of marking for curbside pickup but it always seemed to be items that were not necessarily what I would call "garbage" because it was often nice looking household goods like furniture.

 

[cj7hawk]

Well, I cleaned out the debris and detritus from the Kaypro and reassembled, and it still boots... It has a C14 socket for a C13 plug now, so takes a normal power supply cable.

The faulty B drive door is repaired and the door closes, but the keyboard cable was cut also, so I'm waiting on some RJ9 cables from Amazon so I can type in commands and see if the B drive is readable.

Then I need to see if the 8088 coprocessor is working and if it can run MSDOS.

It really is a shame that such equipment is thrown out On the other hand, resurrecting it is a part of it's charm

 

[cjs]

It really is a shame that such equipment is thrown out

I don't know about that. You just got for free something that, even in the state you found it, probably would cost me ¥20,000 from Yahoo Auctions, if one ever came up at all.

On the other hand, I did get a very cute word processor with a very cool wide-aspect-ratio CRT for only ¥1000, plus ¥900 shipping. I'm just hoping it has some sort of normal CPU and a ROM I can dump....

 

[cj7hawk]

I don't know about that. You just got for free something that, even in the state you found it, probably would cost me ¥20,000 from Yahoo Auctions, if one ever came up at all.

On the other hand, I did get a very cute word processor with a very cool wide-aspect-ratio CRT for only ¥1000, plus ¥900 shipping. I'm just hoping it has some sort of normal CPU and a ROM I can dump....

I didn't get it for free. Someone else got it for free. They are not likely to be the seller, so they got money for it, and the seller got market price. I paid market price in an auction

But on buying old vintage computers, I find a *lot* of what is available in Australia comes with the power cord missing ( This is about the fourth time in a few years... Maybe around 1 in 10 items ) and if I include that to all of the computers with evidence of being left out in a rubbing pile, complete with water damage and sometimes rubble, I'd estimate maybe a quarter to a half of all of the computers I buy would fit that category...

I've never been fortunate enough to find a nice vintage PC on the side of the road yet... Though I did pick up a couple of nice laptops just a few years old about a decade ago. The original owner had stabbed all of the memory chips with a screwdriver and removed the hard drive, but the rest worked OK and they left the screens alone. I assume they were protecting their data, but stabbing DRAM chips with a screwdriver is a bit strange.

The worse I ever bought the seller didn't mention they dug the laptop up out of Landfill in India. I knew it was from India, but I didn't know it was dug from Landfill until I opened it up and found the landfill throughout the inside. Fortunately, the computer itself was salvageable and I got it working again, though some tracks had bad corrosion and quite a few chips were dead.

I am still grateful to the colletors though... Without them even the opportunity to buy old stuff wouldn't be open to us... I just don't understand why there's a whole lot of intentional vandalism of the power leads, and the seller did indicate they didn't know what happened to the power lead when selling it.

Please repost the picture of your cool word processor - I'd love to see it. I've most recently added a few Japanese machines to my collection. A JR-100U, a JR-200 and a PC-88 (MR). The JR-100U was my first computer so I went looking for another.

 

[doshea]

As already mentioned, I've certainly heard that people like to go around and cut the cables off things for the copper. That makes sense, if people are willing to steal copper that still has high voltage running through it, then they're definitely going to take the less spicy cables.

Someone told me (I have no idea where he got this information from though) that when local governments collect that rubbish, the money they made from cutting the cables off themselves and selling them for copper was helping to offset the cost of collecting the rubbish, so they don't like it much when other people beat them to it. If that's true, then perhaps some local governments are sending staff out to collect copper before someone else gets it? I'm not sure if it would be cost-effective to pay someone to do that though.

 

[cj7hawk]

You guys are destroying my wonderfully crafted conspiracy theory here...

But you bring up a good point @doshea , imagine if councils knew what to look for and they kept old computers aside for collectors and recyclers. They already separate E-waste... I wonder what happens to it all?

 

[Svenska]

You guys are destroying my wonderfully crafted conspiracy theory here...

Occam's razor. There is very little incentive to go out and destroy the value of something with so little value that it is rather thrown away than being sold.

The retro computing niche is tiny. The general population assigns zero value to these things.

I don't buy the "local government tries to recoup its cost by selling copper" at all. At least in Europe, local governments are fundamentally tax-funded. Also, the amount of red tape and hoops to jump through to sell literal trash is insane. Such a program could never recoup its own cost, while relying purely on luck (i.e. hoping that people throw away enough cable). In my opinion, whoever sold you this idea was either woefully uninformed or wanted to justify his way of acquiring copper.

 

[cjs]

...but stabbing DRAM chips with a screwdriver is a bit strange.

Oh, I don't know. I've had plenty of times in my life when I've been frustrated enough during a debugging session, that, had the idea just popped into my head, I definitely would have gone in and started stabbing the traitorous DRAM chips.

Please repost the picture of your cool word processor - I'd love to see it. I've most recently added a few Japanese machines to my collection. A JR-100U, a JR-200 and a PC-88 (MR). The JR-100U was my first computer so I went looking for another.

Oh, this is brilliant! Please start a thread with some pics of your JR-100U, and post a ROM dump! (Oops, should have looked. I've found the existing thread; I'll comment more there.) I have never seen one, though I have seen pics of the foreign JR-200. Which BIOS, too, come to think of it, I do not have a copy of. (Though perhaps it was unchanged?) I have only the Japanese JR-200 (two versions) and JR-100.

I have dumps of the both JP BIOSes and the BASIC, along with partially disassembled versions of them, and lots of other docs in my retroabandon/panasonic-jr repo. That machine is also one of the reasons why I wrote my 6800 simulator. I'd love to get back to doing more work on it, if you're interested.

I don't know what happened to the photo I posted; it looked ok when I originally posted it. But here's another try:

 

[Plasma]

In the US, when you put out your trash anyone can take it. Including the police or "retro collectors." Nobody from the government goes around inspecting trash or cutting cords.

Many times people will put out furniture or appliances in hopes that someone actually does take it, because the garbage collection often charges disposal fees for large items.

 

[westveld]

In the US, when you put out your trash anyone can take it. Including the police or "retro collectors." Nobody from the government goes around inspecting trash or cutting cords.

Many times people will put out furniture or appliances in hopes that someone actually does take it, because the garbage collection often charges disposal fees for large items.

And the joke is no one will take it if you put it out for free ... so put a price on it and someone will steal it

 

[cj7hawk]

Occam's razor. There is very little incentive to go out and destroy the value of something with so little value that it is rather thrown away than being sold.

The retro computing niche is tiny. The general population assigns zero value to these things.

I don't buy the "local government tries to recoup its cost by selling copper" at all. At least in Europe, local governments are fundamentally tax-funded. Also, the amount of red tape and hoops to jump through to sell literal trash is insane. Such a program could never recoup its own cost, while relying purely on luck (i.e. hoping that people throw away enough cable). In my opinion, whoever sold you this idea was either woefully uninformed or wanted to justify his way of acquiring copper.

As unrealistic as it sounds, I did find posts supporting this from some local governments - as in the posts were made by the local government making this claim and apparently it was sufficiently supportive of their finances that they made it a common practice, so I know this does happen, but I doubt it's a common reason for it.

Seems this goes deeper than I imagined.... I need to find a way to add the deep state into it.

On a more serious note, I do know the original reason was pretty valid, but it seems like cord cutting can have a lot of reasons.
* Sometimes the local government being petty
* Sometimes the local government being practical
* Sometimes other junk collectors being petty / nasty.
* Sometimes copper collectors.
* Sometimes the former owner trying to further devalue what they are discarding.
* Sometimes just a learned behavior.
* Sometimes the cable was needed for something else.

There's a huge amount of technology still discarded that is no longer being made / preserved. Emulation is fine, but drives are needed sometimes. They don't make Floppy Drives anymore and sometimes a real system is needed.