In my similarly related career, I've seen this happen a few times -
company moving or not. Though in my later years, it's become more rare
to see it (I think mainly because of contracts stipulating "data
destruction" - so instead you get companies that "hoard" the stuff,
because they can't afford to get rid of it properly).
One place I worked at, did such a similar move, and the IT guy said
"come in after work on Friday and take anything you want left behind" -
and so I did.
Loaded up my pickup with a bunch of old 1U servers (we did cloud server
hosting) - virtually all of them had no hard drives, but the cases were
good, and there were the motherboards and memory and other stuff inside.
I also scored an ASUS eeePC network "workstation". Plus a bunch of RAM,
which has it's own story:
In the old office, sitting in what was the conference room, was a
"discarded" blade server. I would've taken the whole unit, but I
couldn't lift it by myself (between the case, power supplies, and XEON
"sandwich heatsinking" - it was a heavy sucker). So I decided to take
the sticks of RAM in it...and there were many. All ECC, matched
pairs...nice stuff.
The next Monday, I arrived at our new office, and there was an email
from our head IT guy asking about "did anybody take the RAM out of that
blade server" - and my heart sunk a bit. I went to his office, and told
him that I took it all out, and I could bring it back in the next day,
but in my defense, the email did say "anything left in the old office"
and said nothing about that particular server...
He just shook his head and told me to keep it.
...and today, a decade later, all of it still sits in my garage stacked
where I originally put it, serving as quality shelving and display for
my personal "Museum of Fine Dust Collection".
Regarding the SBCs you found - good score! I have a few such boards
myself (all of them bought off Ebay or obtained from hamfest swapmeets);
did yours have the 8031/51 with the built-in BASIC (in either rom or
prom iirc - maybe there was a windowed eprom version available - I'm not
sure), or is the BASIC on an external eprom?
Because the version of that CPU with the built-in BASIC is fairly
difficult to obtain (and when you do find one for sale, they aren't
really that cheap). I don't know if I'd call 'em "rare"...but I don't
see 'em for sale often. The "unburned" version is easier to obtain
(either can be configured to use the "external memory space" that the
internal ROM would take up - and you can easily "burn" a copy of BASIC
into an EPROM within that space that can be booted into and act the same
way as the pre-burned ones (something I've wondered about is whether
there could be a way to do it like the CoCo 3 and be in "all-RAM" mode,
but I've never seen any literature from that era that mentions such a
thing, so it might now be possible)...
Anyhow, it sounds like you've found yourself some fun "toys to play with"!
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
phoenixgarage.org
github.com/andrew-ayers
