9 IIci's and an LC that were left outside in the rain.

[Mike Richardson]

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/5104/photoaw9.jpg

This picture does not do justice to the injustice these Macs have received.

We will be parting basically all of these out. Most of the motherboards are crap. We may get some PSUs, the hard drives are probably good, maybe a few floppy drives, some RAM or cache cards we can clean off. A few NuBus cards.

And a big pile of scrap plastic.

Not to mention the LC 575s and LC 580s covered in mud that we are parting out immediately.

Let's give a warm welcome to Texas City ISD for storing their surplus equipment outside directly on a football field.

 

[Gil]

8-o :O [xx(] ]'> [V]

 

[oneboyarmy]

With people doing stupid things like that it's no wonder I can't ever find the IIci I've always wanted. [!] !]'>

 

[Unknown_K]

Are they rusted out?

 

[Mike Richardson]

Are they rusted out?

We just finished chopping them.

- Only one IIci motherboard looked decent enough to even consider testing. The others had corroded batteries and/or significant rust.

- We save five IIci tops and one bottom. The rest were extremely nasty and have been crushed.

- We saved all of the PSUs for testing and refurbishment.

- We kept any cards. All of the memory was pulled before we got them (or they had no memory, I can't remember if IIci had onboard memory)

- Hard drives look good, but floppy drives were exposed to weather and were all rusted out.

One LC 520 had a live lizard in it, and the LC 575 had baby spiders.

 

[tyrannis]

9 IIci's and an LC still look like $81,700 worth of taxpayer investment to me. A school district wouldn't leave $82k worth of older textbooks out in a field. I don't understand this peculiar tendency to view even the most recently "obsolete" hardware as worthless.

 

[Unknown_K]

Books tend to not get obsolete (except for some bleeding edge scientific ones but those are no schools books).

I still have a spare IIci motherboard, could use a case and a PS :;

Wonder how long those machines were sitting out in the weather, could be they rusted in the schools basement that had a water leak and they just dumped them in the field for disposal.

Did the school inscribe their name and ID # in the case plastics (hate that). One of my IIgs and both LC3's have school markings on them. What do schools do with the massive amount of old mac software they have anyway?

 

[Christopher]

Books tend to not get obsolete (except for some bleeding edge scientific ones but those are no schools books).
I still have a spare IIci motherboard, could use a case and a PS :;

Wonder how long those machines were sitting out in the weather, could be they rusted in the schools basement that had a water leak and they just dumped them in the field for disposal.

Did the school inscribe their name and ID # in the case plastics (hate that). One of my IIgs and both LC3's have school markings on them. What do schools do with the massive amount of old mac software they have anyway?

They make CD shredders. [V]

 

[Scott Baret]

Let me know how the power supply testing goes with those IIcis. I could use a new one for mine.

 

[Unknown_K]

CD shredders are for user created backups and data, you can toss MS Windows CDs and apps directly into the trash without any issues.

I was thinking more about floppies since both the IIci's and LCs would have had software on floppy.

 

[iamdigitalman]

Books tend to not get obsolete (except for some bleeding edge scientific ones but those are no schools books).
I still have a spare IIci motherboard, could use a case and a PS :;

Wonder how long those machines were sitting out in the weather, could be they rusted in the schools basement that had a water leak and they just dumped them in the field for disposal.

Did the school inscribe their name and ID # in the case plastics (hate that). One of my IIgs and both LC3's have school markings on them. What do schools do with the massive amount of old mac software they have anyway?

In my case, I find a bunch of it rotting in a cabinet in my high school. I figured since it was, and since probably nobody knew about it or had seen it in over 10 years, and since they were moving out of the building at the end of the year and it would have all been destroyed, I helped myself to it. It's now all sitting in a box in a spare room. I think I made the right choice.

 

[MacMan]

When I was at school there was a lot of old Mac software sitting in boxes in cupboards and drawers. Quite often it would gather dust and then get chucked out - fortunately I managed to save the vast majority of software before that happened to it. The school was always glad to give away their old stuff to someone who would appreciate it.

Computers tend to rot quite quickly if they are left outdoors in the rain for any length of time. I have rescued a couple that have been out for a couple of days and often after drying they work fine. Once I even found a SE/30 that looked like it had been out for at least 2 weeks and after stripping down, cleaning and drying it worked perfectly (and still does). Once rust and other corrosion kicks in though there is generally little hope.

 

[Gil]

The school was always glad to give away their old stuff to someone who would appreciate it.

Lucky.

When my elementary school was getting rid of their Macs (LC575s, 5400s, 9500s) back in 2004 for some crappy PC's that were even slower than the Macs, I asked about buying one (I was even willing to pay), and they said "We have a deal with a recycler."

Heaven forbid they could let ONE computer go. :-/ :

 

[Dennis Nedry]

Did you salvage any of the plastic reset/interrupt button extender things? I could use one of those.

 

[Christopher]

The school was always glad to give away their old stuff to someone who would appreciate it.

Lucky.

When my elementary school was getting rid of their Macs (LC575s, 5400s, 9500s) back in 2004 for some crappy PC's that were even slower than the Macs, I asked about buying one (I was even willing to pay), and they said "We have a deal with a recycler."

Heaven forbid they could let ONE computer go. :-/ :

Best time to get macs is when the school is closed over the summer and they are getting rid of their macs. }

 

[Charlieman]

9 IIci's and an LC still look like $81,700 worth of taxpayer investment to me.

Economics of old computers?

The IIci was discontinued in February 1993. The accountants probably wrote them off as zero value in 1999, and anyone who chose to use one in a production environment would know that they were pushing their luck. The cost of a replacement power supply (new, from an Apple dealer) would have been half the cost of a new Mac. And, yes, I do know about the salvage market but many organisations *can't* buy off eBay.

So at the time that the Macs were put in a field, they had zero value to the owner.

Having worked with computer scrappers, I know the unwritten rules. I will give the scrapper loads of junk that s/he will consider unsalable and thus pay money for its disposal. I will also give the scrapper some useful stuff, which has no value to me. However, the scrapper will clean it up or remove the useful electronics, and resell it. I am obliged to give more useful stuff than unusable stuff.

As the person who gives away the scrap, I don't care about its value to others. It has no value to my organisation, and it is up to the scrapper to determine what is salable. I worry about managing desktop environments and the infrastructure that supports them, and similarly leave the scrapper to run his/her business.

Dumping kit outdoors is stupid from a business relationship perspective. The scrapper knows what can be sold, so if your organisation is scrapping kit, store it in the same way as if you wished to reuse it.

 

[joshc]

Only one IIci motherboard looked decent enough to even consider testing. The others had corroded batteries and/or significant rust.

I would have tried cleaning those boards - just because they "look" bad doesn't mean they won't work. So cleaning them thoroughly and removing the rust with vinegar will not hurt. Corroded batteries can be replaced.

 

[tyrannis]

at the time that the Macs were put in a field, they had zero value to the owner.

At the time those Macs were put in a field, they had intrinsic value as machines capable of doing everything they did twenty years ago. The owner is the Texas City ISD and the people of Texas City, and there is a much better use for older computers than the acceptance of a few dollars from a recycler. Why should they not transfer the depreciated equipment and software licenses to the families and children receiving other forms of public assistance in an effort to support the overall educational mission?

Those tax funds were allocated to enhance the educational opportunities offered to the children of Texas City. In spite of the depreciation their capabilities from an educational perspective are intact. I consider this cycle of investment and disposal a colossal waste. Even an Apple IIe has some practical value with a few decent programs, with the potential to help a kid something as simple as phonics or multiplication tables.

This waste is the reason I run a non-profit organization, rounding up the 1995 - 1997 wave of outgoing IT expenditure and channeling it into the lower income communities here in Houston.

 

[MacMan]

The scrapper knows what can be sold, so if your organisation is scrapping kit, store it in the same way as if you wished to reuse it.

My current place of work has been known before to deliberately break equipment before scrapping it so that it is of no use to anyone. This was back in the day when they threw everything in the general waste skips, including computers, and they didn't want anyone salvaging stuff. Despite being broken, occasionally useful bits (RAM, drives etc) could be recovered from machines. Fortunately they are now required to use a proper electronics disposal container and they have mostly stopped smashing things before they go in. However, I did see them compacting a load of stuff into the container by ramming it with a forklift, so it is generally best to save anything before the container gets full!