During the time spent clearing rooms I had never before seen I came across several new boxed VT420 terminals, two new and unused DEC 3100 microvaxen, two ProLiant six CPU servers (used) and a whole herd of PC’s and other equipment – all just thrown into a skip. There were around a hundred Allied Telesis segment repeaters, along with boards for RM600’s there were nine 4 CPU cards, boards for the Pyramid Nile systems (these were beautifully manufactured CPU cards), boards for the symmetrix (two full sets of 16 boards) in all there was enough stuff to fill around 16 skips. Other stuff that went into these skips included around 20 Blackberry’s, loads of SCSI cables of all types – including around 20 of the cables terminated with the micro SCSI connectors. In one of the last rooms to be cleared there were spares still sealed in boxes for the ICL DRS systems that we had up until 1992, they were all binned.
All in all the original cost of all the kit that I binned must have ran to seven figures, this didn’t include the thousands of cable that were thrown out – well the bits that stuck above the floor anyway. Or all the two meter RAC cabinets that were thrown away (there were 16 of these, four of them were only a year old and had never been used. As the deadline for leaving the old offices neared, the activity became even more frantic – and the equipment and there is just far too much to list here was binned in a real hurry.
There was absolutely no debate about what went into the skip, everything did. As I said earlier the faclities manager thanked me personally for my efforts and if you’d been standing near by you would have thought that I was the only person involved in clearing the building – that I had cleared a building with eight floors each the size of a football pitch myself. To have done that I would have had to have had my “Y” fronts outside my trousers and have had my duffel coat buttoned at the neck only and worn as a cape.