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azalemethtoday at 6:02 PM1 replyview on HN

I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it.

It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy...

I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!


Replies

kev009today at 7:51 PM

Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.