Oh, you have no idea how pissed I am. I already started a thread where I cry about my city recycling tons of vintage computers. As someone suggested, I just stopped going there or else I'd just sit there and cry all day.

Seems there is a ton of people now (on craigslists and such) that advertise picking up old computer hardware. It's the new thing. Escrap is getting popular. They have no idea what's in those computers but they just strip them bare, destroy boards (by cutting the gold fingers off and ripping off heatsinks and such) and sell it by the pound on ebay. breaks my heart. Sometimes if I see anything in the pile and the photo is of the actual item, I buy them. Unfortunately many times it's just a stock photo they reuse or only display the top of the open box so you don't know what's inside. There are forums dedicated to this escrap recycling where they talk about it.

I mean, seriously how many boards must have been slaughtered here?

Yep, ugh that's so sad! 😢

I also think that these idiots are also the culprit responsible for the influx of high prices for parts on eBay these days as well, the average joe seller has no idea what they are contributing too, it's all about the dollar to them, just as it is to these "gold recovery" scrapers as well. It's not a good sign at all. 😵

I often wonder how many stuff that is rare now keeps being destroyed/shredded everyday. As you can see on my signature, i'm looking for an original AdLib card. How many of these historic cards have been shredded across the world? How many AdLib Golds have disappeared? How many are left? One of my quests is to collect and preserve this stuff. I'll give this stuff a good life, and i'll do my best to educate my children to preserve this stuff when i'm gone.

Preserving hardware is much more difficult than to preserve software. There are enough web projects to preserve old software for old machines. How about hardware? It's up to us guys. Call me a geek, obsessed, crazy i don't give a f**k. I have a true love for this stuff, and this scrapping for gold pisses me off. It really does.

I do what I can to save this stuff from the blissful ignorance of the uneducated masses. => http://gabucino.be/inv.htm

I have read somewhere on the net that some guy threw two working IMFCs into a dumpster during early 2000s. Oh, the pain...

There have been a few threads about this topic.

It is indeed a shame all that retro goodness has been destroyed.

I think its hard to fathom the amount of hardware that has been destroyed over the last 20 years.
If we only had a complete list of everything scrapped we would cry 😜

PhaytalError wrote:

... these so called "gold recovery" idiots, completely DESTROYING working parts?

It seriously pisses me off to no end, and the onslaught of this catastrophe is making the old stuff harder and harder to find. 😠 😒

Yes, it pisses me off too. That's why I search the scrap gold listings looking for rare parts. I've salvaged a motherboard and a few CPUs already from those lots.

What really pisses me off now is the ones that sell the melted metal as ingots. You don't even get the chance to save whatever parts they melted down to get the metal with those. To make it worse, they don't even separate the metals you have to do that yourself so a 1oz ingot from them might have very little precious metal in it and a lot of base metal.

I hate electronics scrappers with every fiber in my being. There is no real gain from it, the whole e-waste and e-scraping program is a big scam. It's all bullshit. All it does is make prices on Ebay go up and make everyone else who sells old hardware think they have something rare and worth alot. Senseless destruction of good hardware, yeah it really pisses me off.

I don't like the regular scrappers either. I go out of my way to deprive them of metal in my neighborhood and at work. Fuck all scrappers.

My hatred towards local scrappers started when instead of taking the CRT TVs or monitors people left on the curb like they always did, they take a hammer to the picture tube to get the copper in the deflection coils, in most cases ruining a perfectly good piece of equipment (that could be scavenged by me!) and making it more of an environmental hazard than it already is. We still have analog TV on the airwaves for god's sake! It wouldn't surprise me if they also got picky with computers too.

In the rare occasion that I have to dump a CRT I remove the coils & chassis and swap them with a profanity-laden note, just to troll them.

133MHz wrote:

In the rare occasion that I have to dump a CRT I remove the coils & chassis and swap them with a profanity-laden note, just to troll them.

Awesome!

I get pissed off about crappy topic titles.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one is going to buy these Celerons I've been trying to unload for months with the intention of actually using them.

133MHz wrote:

My hatred towards local scrappers started when instead of taking the CRT TVs or monitors people left on the curb like they always did, they take a hammer to the picture tube to get the copper in the deflection coils, in most cases ruining a perfectly good piece of equipment (that could be scavenged by me!) and making it more of an environmental hazard than it already is. We still have analog TV on the airwaves for god's sake! It wouldn't surprise me if they also got picky with computers too.

In the rare occasion that I have to dump a CRT I remove the coils & chassis and swap them with a profanity-laden note, just to troll them.

I have guys that go around by me and when they see CRT monitors out for trash they snip the cables off of them and leave the rest, making them unusable for anyone who might need one.

I have to admit, it annoys me too.

If having excess stuff lying around is the issue, then I personally donate it. Retro people ARE out there, even in my country. Never understood why some people always have to try and make a buck out of something..... 😠

On a side note, the idiots that try to palm off old hardware for RIDICULOUS sums of money peeve me even more so. Honestly, 200 US dollars for a 486 board that isn't even anything special?? Give me a break.

Forevermore wrote:

I have to admit, it annoys me too.

If having excess stuff lying around is the issue, then I personally donate it. Retro people ARE out there, even in my country. Never understood why some people always have to try and make a buck out of something..... 😠

On a side note, the idiots that try to palm off old hardware for RIDICULOUS sums of money peeve me even more so. Honestly, 200 US dollars for a 486 board that isn't even anything special?? Give me a break.

There is still a lot of industrial machinery in use that is either irreplaceable or would cost 10's of thousands of dollars to replace. $200 for a replacement motherboard is reasonable in those circumstances.

It's a really sad situation we are living in nowadays - and doubly so in my case. Not only are the scrappers running around constantly, but my own family is into this idea of 'recycling' as well! Everyone in my household (including my father) wants me to "get rid of the old stuff" ASAP. Even my uncle (and he is the one who introduced me to computers in the first place); last year he gave away his still working Media Vision Multimedia Kit to a local scrapper simply because it was old and useless to him! He refused to just give it to me and never told me even once what he was planning to do with it! Once I heard what he did, I could only shake my head in disbelief 😢 .

As of now, I simply do what I can to rescue old computer hardware whenever possible; it's a long, lonely uphill battle, but very much worth it.

PS: I definitely agree with you, bristlehog; it's very, very painful to see this happen (just look at my sig)

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

It's a really sad situation we are living in nowadays - and doubly so in my case. Not only are the scrappers running around constantly, but my own family is into this idea of 'recycling' as well! Everyone in my household (including my father) wants me to "get rid of the old stuff" ASAP. Even my uncle (and he is the one who introduced me to computers in the first place); last year he gave away his still working Media Vision Multimedia Kit to a local scrapper simply because it was old and useless to him! He refused to just give it to me and never told me even once what he was planning to do with it! Once I heard what he did, I could only shake my head in disbelief 😢 .

As of now, I simply do what I can to rescue old computer hardware whenever possible; it's a long, lonely uphill battle, but very much worth it.

PS: I definitely agree with you, bristlehog; it's very, very painful to see this happen (just look at my sig)

Blame the green weenies for the whole "Recycle Everything!" mentality. They have most of the world brainwashed, especially in Europe where they even make you recycle your food waste and will send the police around to pick through your garbage cans and issue you with a summons to appear in court if they find anything that shouldn't be in there.

sliderider wrote:

There is still a lot of industrial machinery in use that is either irreplaceable or would cost 10's of thousands of dollars to replace. $200 for a replacement motherboard is reasonable in those circumstances.

It is also reasonable in the circumstance of how much it is to replace a motor vehicle or any of it's components (I'm a car nut too). But that is not the point. That machinery should cost that much to replace. A dirty ol' 486 board should not.

People often forget about the three Rs of recycling; reuse, repurpose, recycle. Sure, you can take an older system and scrap it for gold, but why go through all that time and effort when you can just fix it up a bit and get it up and working as a websurfing box, or a router, or an HTPC, or a guest computer, or whatever? There is no legitimate reason for anyone to destroy a working computer.

It is worse for those who have limited money to burn after new taxes like obamacare that is socking people for thousands now. As a college student and in a economically depressed area (thanks a lot you masonic scum bags) the rising prices because of these greedy scrappers is just too much to endure. Can't build half the projects that I was used to building from even a few years ago. To top it off local stocks of vintage systems has for the most part dried up and even fewer honey pots (more than one vintage find).