There's a Compaq ProLiant ML 350 on German Ebay right now for 220€.

henryVK wrote:

There's a Compaq ProLiant ML 350 on German Ebay right now for 220€.

Thanks so much Henry, suggestion appreciated!
(I was referring to older systems, early 90s).

About more recent systems like the ML 350, yes, ONE specimen can be found popping up every now and then, but that's what I expect from a single home computer sale or a tiny company.

What I would have expected is corporations selling ALL their system in lots, knowing that there's an entire retrocomputing market, to even make money from their systems instead of throwing them out.

Like, what I would expect is to open eBay, for example, search Compaq Systempro and find a seller selling like 5 fully functional computers which belonged to the X company here, 15 computers which belonged to company Y there, and so on.

aries-mu wrote:

What I would have expected is corporations selling ALL their system in lots, knowing that there's an entire retrocomputing market, to even make money from their systems instead of throwing them out.

I get it. But apparently that just doesn't happen much (as evidenced by for instance Ebay). My guess is when those systems you speak of became obsolete, people just viewed them as junk to be gotten rid of. Probably they put them in a basement somewhere until they were good and worthless and then let some 3rd party company junk them after a couple of years.

henryVK wrote:

aries-mu wrote:

What I would have expected is corporations selling ALL their system in lots, knowing that there's an entire retrocomputing market, to even make money from their systems instead of throwing them out.

I get it. But apparently that just doesn't happen much (as evidenced by for instance Ebay). My guess is when those systems you speak of became obsolete, people just viewed them as junk to be gotten rid of. Probably they put them in a basement somewhere until they were good and worthless and then let some 3rd party company junk them after a couple of years.

I'm afraid you're right!
So much good stuff got junked (and the environment polluted), while it could have been worth money for the previous owners, fun for the new owners, and no environmental stress! Such a pity!

Numbers were never that high especially early 90's.
First workstation class machine I saw was when I started work in 2002, a Compaq based on a P2 Xeon 400 Mhz and that was already obsolete. The other Graphic designer had a standard socket P3 Compaq with bit more ram and worked just as well.

Every other customer (I worked for a outsourcing IT company in Sydney) used standard PC's usually Win98 on a domain, It wasn't until XP came that most companies moved over to NT based OS for client side of things.

And this is around 10 years later then what your looking for, 90's you would have got away with a whitebox PC running Novell if you had a server at all, if you had a network at all, remember no internet either for all but the largest of companies.

chinny22 wrote:

Numbers were never that high especially early 90's. First workstation class machine I saw was when I started work in 2002, a Com […]
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Numbers were never that high especially early 90's.
First workstation class machine I saw was when I started work in 2002, a Compaq based on a P2 Xeon 400 Mhz and that was already obsolete. The other Graphic designer had a standard socket P3 Compaq with bit more ram and worked just as well.

Every other customer (I worked for a outsourcing IT company in Sydney) used standard PC's usually Win98 on a domain, It wasn't until XP came that most companies moved over to NT based OS for client side of things.

And this is around 10 years later then what your looking for, 90's you would have got away with a whitebox PC running Novell if you had a server at all, if you had a network at all, remember no internet either for all but the largest of companies.

Wow this shocks me man! Than why all that money invested by large IT companies like Compaq to design, engineer, and release such big "monsters" if nobody was gonna buy them? The Systempro was even born as a DUAL 386 CPU!!! (then upgraded to dual 486... then if I recall to Pentium...)

aries-mu wrote:

About more recent systems like the ML 350, yes, ONE specimen can be found popping up every now and then, but that's what I expect from a single home computer sale or a tiny company.

You missed your moment. I picked up five G4/G4p models in 2014 for pennies. These are 2004/2005 computers so release date+10 years is when corporations were dumping them. Now, not so much.

(I'm typing this on one.)

Right, it's too late now! 🙁

I'm sure larger Uni's and massive multinational companies may have had 1 or maybe even 2 per site and would have had to pay the money to pay for these systems which would have had "big monster price tag" to match 😉

Internet was probably the big force behind computerised systems though, We didn't get our first PC till 95 which was late but not unheard of. Early 90's computer training would have had to be a thing vs these days where your expected to know how to use a PC. Why spend money on a expensive PC AND training? anyone can use a typewriter? got to print it out to fax to someone else anyway?

chinny22 wrote:

I'm sure larger Uni's and massive multinational companies may have had 1 or maybe even 2 per site and would have had to pay the money to pay for these systems which would have had "big monster price tag" to match 😉

Internet was probably the big force behind computerised systems though, We didn't get our first PC till 95 which was late but not unheard of. Early 90's computer training would have had to be a thing vs these days where your expected to know how to use a PC. Why spend money on a expensive PC AND training? anyone can use a typewriter? got to print it out to fax to someone else anyway?

🤣!

I see!

I guess I was lucky to have a 286 in 1992 at home, which sparked everything! God bless that Storm Mistral 80286!!!

Errius wrote:

aries-mu wrote:

About more recent systems like the ML 350, yes, ONE specimen can be found popping up every now and then, but that's what I expect from a single home computer sale or a tiny company.

You missed your moment. I picked up five G4/G4p models in 2014 for pennies. These are 2004/2005 computers so release date+10 years is when corporations were dumping them. Now, not so much.

(I'm typing this on one.)

All this environmental e waste rules and data wiping regulations kill of our supply lines more then anything else!
In the past I could just "offer to take that away for you" It still works for customers I have good working relation with, but lesser known ones just want to pay someone to get rid of it and have the paperwork to prove its not their problem if anything does come back to bite them (fair enough)

aries-mu wrote:

LOL! […]
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chinny22 wrote:

I'm sure larger Uni's and massive multinational companies may have had 1 or maybe even 2 per site and would have had to pay the money to pay for these systems which would have had "big monster price tag" to match 😉

Internet was probably the big force behind computerised systems though, We didn't get our first PC till 95 which was late but not unheard of. Early 90's computer training would have had to be a thing vs these days where your expected to know how to use a PC. Why spend money on a expensive PC AND training? anyone can use a typewriter? got to print it out to fax to someone else anyway?

🤣!

I see!

I guess I was lucky to have a 286 in 1992 at home, which sparked everything! God bless that Storm Mistral 80286!!!

Indeed! most of us would have had some Atari, Commodore, or similar

Right!!!

In the case of the company I work for, we tend to keep our customer's old servers and computers for a few years in case any data is needed off them. Once the customer says they don't need it, the customers then pay us to hire a company to come pick them up to be recycled. So that is what happens to the large stash of old Dell computers and such that we maintain for our customers here. Because the equipment technically belongs to the customer, I can't do much to salvage them for anything myself. Customer isn't wanting to sell anything and have to keep track of additional paperwork or taxes for such sales on their end and would just rather pay us a one time service fee to have it recycled. And naturally all SN#s are accounted for in the process so it isn't like one can slip away or several just disappear.

CrossBow777 wrote:

In the case of the company I work for, we tend to keep our customer's old servers and computers for a few years in case any data is needed off them. Once the customer says they don't need it, the customers then pay us to hire a company to come pick them up to be recycled. So that is what happens to the large stash of old Dell computers and such that we maintain for our customers here. Because the equipment technically belongs to the customer, I can't do much to salvage them for anything myself. Customer isn't wanting to sell anything and have to keep track of additional paperwork or taxes for such sales on their end and would just rather pay us a one time service fee to have it recycled. And naturally all SN#s are accounted for in the process so it isn't like one can slip away or several just disappear.

Oh man, it's so complicated to even throw out some garbage! Thanks for the details.

aries-mu wrote:

[...]

Wow this shocks me man! Than why all that money invested by large IT companies like Compaq to design, engineer, and release such big "monsters" if nobody was gonna buy them? The Systempro was even born as a DUAL 386 CPU!!! (then upgraded to dual 486... then if I recall to Pentium...)

Take a look a the prices of those beasts. It wasn't a volume market and the products were priced accordingly. If you only expect to sell a few thousand units, you need to recoup your R&D over those few thousand units so the markup over unit costs has to be big. That's also why they were always overengineered: once you've factored in all those costs, the additional cost of good build quality is tiny, but the cost of losing a customer huge. So you build the stuff to be easy to work on and with and you build it to last.

That's the exact same reason why bargain-basement supermarket-sold PCs will always be crap: they are volume products, the margins are wafer-thin and cutting a few corners on build quality your average user wouldn't even notice can cause profitability to skyrocket. And dying soon is actually an advantage - you want to have a customer replace their PC as soon as they are out of warranty.

dionb wrote:

aries-mu wrote:

[...]

Wow this shocks me man! Than why all that money invested by large IT companies like Compaq to design, engineer, and release such big "monsters" if nobody was gonna buy them? The Systempro was even born as a DUAL 386 CPU!!! (then upgraded to dual 486... then if I recall to Pentium...)

Take a look a the prices of those beasts. It wasn't a volume market and the products were priced accordingly. If you only expect to sell a few thousand units, you need to recoup your R&D over those few thousand units so the markup over unit costs has to be big. That's also why they were always overengineered: once you've factored in all those costs, the additional cost of good build quality is tiny, but the cost of losing a customer huge. So you build the stuff to be easy to work on and with and you build it to last.

That's the exact same reason why bargain-basement supermarket-sold PCs will always be crap: they are volume products, the margins are wafer-thin and cutting a few corners on build quality your average user wouldn't even notice can cause profitability to skyrocket. And dying soon is actually an advantage - you want to have a customer replace their PC as soon as they are out of warranty.

Good points!!!

I work at big university library, and the new server we're getting costs something like 25000€ iirc.

I had a chance to get one last year at local recycling center, but I thought it was too big and I didn't have enough room, so they recycled it. It didn't have any standard parts that could have been used anywhere else either except cpus and ram.

They don't exist anymore because they were scrapped and recycled well over 10-15 years ago. There was no reason for people to keep them until today.