[Info-vax] DEC VAX 8650

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-02-10 17:14, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Johnny Billquist  <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> On 2023-02-09 02:43, Fernando Colon Osorio wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, February 14, 1995 at 1:20:08 PM UTC-5, John Slauson wrote:
>>>> I have 21 (yes, twenty-one) VAX 8650s to sell. The machines are
>>>> new and still in the original DEC boxes. Can anyone help me
>>>> determine what a reasonable price for these would be?
>>> I know your post was ions ago. However, do you have any left. I will be interested in purchaing one.
>>
>> Almost 30 years. And I doubt the poster was even correct. A VAX8650
>> isn't exactly just in "a box". The machine is *big*. If you had 21 of
>> them, you'd need some serious storage.
> 
> If the customer with them is who I think it was, they probably did have
> some serious storage.

If someone would be storing 21 of these machines, we're talking a 
serious warehouse.

> But Compuserve is long gone and this appears to be a drive-by because
> Mr. Slauson doesn't seem to have posted anything else much to Usenet.

Compuserve was mostly running PDP-10 unless I'm confused. Would be a 
little surprised if they had plenty of -8650s, but I could be wrong.

But new, still in the box? Who would buy so many of that machine and 
never use them? We're talking many millions of dollars, back in the 80s. 
Seems crazy that someone would just buy that much hardware and just 
store it, for so much money...

> I suspect this is the Slauson who later went on to found Adaptick and
> became a big-name quantitative analyist on wall street.
> 
>> Price of the hardware might be an interesting question, but the real big
>> one is location. Shipping of one might turn out to be very expensive...
> 
> There were a lot of things available thirty years ago that are no longer
> around.  Thirty years ago, I had hair!

:-)

Depending on what else you might get along with the machine, we might be 
talking about shipping close to one ton of hardware for a single machine...

   Johnny