> I have not been following much of the IBM 3745 discussions but I know I > looked into it back in the early 21st Century. I looked at the Visara > offering and it was interesting. At that point I learned there is a firm in > Bethesda, MD which has been buying up every surplus 3745 they can get for > spare parts. Hopefully they were monitoring GSA and how it salvages IT > equipment.
Yes, this is part of the lifecycle (deathcycle?) of mainframe equipment. First, the mainframe shops start decommissioning the equipment. Then, the resellers and maintenance firms go on a feeding frenzy to build up repair stock for the remaining machines. After they have their fill, the scrappers start buying the machines as ore. After that, the machines are gone. I tend to like to get the machines at the third stage, where I compete with the scrappers (or better yet, when super kind people on the IBM Mainframe Discussion List point me towards machines free for the taking!). This is how I managed to get a 3705 and 3725, but I missed out of the great 3380/3880 purge by waiting too long, and now regret it. -- Will ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
