> I went back to the boneyard yesterday about bought some stuff.  I got a
> Sun keyboard for $5 to replace a flakey one.  Oops, wrong list.  I got a
> 3100/M38 and a 3100/M76.  They let me pick and choose and promised that if
> I couldn't power them up I could swap later.  We went throught several
> boxes before we found ones that had memory and drives.  I gave him $15 for
> each.  

That is reasonable.  I usually give 10 bucks or so around here in surplus.
for them.  I would not spend more than 15 bucks for one, unless I knew
it was full up on ram, and had all the internal cabling.  Usually, the
drives are all too small and will have to be replaced, anyway.

> Some additional recon data:
> 
> If you're bidding on the pallets, be aware that some/many of the boxes may
> not have memory or drives.

That is usual.  I often have to combine 3 or so boxes to get one good box.
Drives are not usually a problem.  Ram seems always to be somewhat
problematic.

> The second pallet they're building has mostly "Storage Expansion" units.  
> Are they good for anything?

Yes, depending upon what they are.  They can contain 300mb, 600mb, 1.0g,
1.3g, or 2 gig drives, usually, and, TK50 or 1/4 inch streamer or better
DLT tape drives.  You have to scope them out a bit or get them to turn
them backside out, so you can read the model numbers off them.  That will
usually have an RZxxx something label, too, that gives an indication
of the drives inside.  RZ58 is a good size.  RZ55 and RZ57 are marginal
since they are 300/600mb size.

Storageworks shelves (the 7 bay hot swap drive cases) are ALWAYS good.
They usually contain 1/2/4 gig drives in surplus, but sometimes larger
sizes and sometimes tape drives.  7 drives in a shelf makes for a nice
external drive system for a VAX or a DECstation.

> There's a bunch of DECstation 5000/2[04]0s.  I opened one and it looks
> like it has a MIPS CPU.  It looks like these are supported by the pmax
> port I know it's the wrong list, but any quick pointers?  Is one of these
> worth pursuing?

The 5000/2xx lines are all usable, with the 260 being the best.
They all run NetBSD just fine.  I run several 5000/200 servers.
They are medium speed (40mhz) and very rugged and reliable.
Ram seems to be what is hard to find in them.  I had to combine
6 boxes worth of ram to get 2 good machines.

> There's a VAXstation 4000/60 with no memory or drives.  What kind of
> memory does it take?

Dunno, offhand.  Look for anyting VAXish in BA123, BA2xx, and BA4xx
cases.  Most of them should be usable.  Maybe a mystical scsi
controller might surface?......(:+}}....

Bob