Vintage surplus electronics mega-warehouse

These stores will have interest of museum only , no business , within 50 years electronics has grwn by hipps and browns , these out dated technologies have no place for task , I think these electronics machinery to be galleried to education institutions

"These stores will have interest of museum only , no business"

Maybe no business, but certainly not just museums. I'd put money on there being dozens, if not hundreds of CR4 members who love looking round places like this!

We used to have a good surplus store in Reading, called "The Shop On The Bridge". Unfortunately, they sold the big store and dropped most of the surplus lines - they now have a fairly small place which is OK for bits & pieces (mostly new), but not a patch on the old place. I miss it.

Well, I would have to say businesses, too. I know of a chemical plant that had a critical monitoring system that was running HP Basic on an old computer (probably a 286). No one knew enough to rewrite the software, and it would not run on newer machines. Of course, things were failing and they were paying big bucks to purchase legacy hardware.

This happens more often than one would expect. They didn't want to fly the Space Shuttle over the new year. The software/hardware is 30 years old, and had a potential glitch that would would make the computer think it was the 366th day of '06 rather than Jan.1 '07. That old hardware is supported, somehow.

Tad

It was not long ago , I owned a Service center for electronics appliances for 15 years started with repairing telephones , radios upgraded to complex services for industrial cards , mobiles , digital controls ,PC`s and controls , these old pieces were literally scraped with better sofisticated , fully automated , precise electronics , you can practically still use these instruments but not in industrial and commercial establishments , you don`t expect support for these old work horses when needed most ,for lack of spares & most important skilled proffesional unavailable , I too preserved some of masterpieces of that time like old electric telephone made of brass casing and all metal parts and ceramic insulators for no-plastic involved weighing 6kgs it was still compatible wit existing telephony circuit with sliding dialing and redial with "multi" ring tones that had 3 options of ring sound with 3 bells combinations , another one was valve operated radio and gramaphone with spring winding for electric generation , now this is also worth to note when we talk of energy conservation , PC`s 8086,086 , 186 , 286 ,with those 51/4 " floppy drives and huge cabinet ,8 mb HDD size equivalent than any compact computer available today , DM printers , Those Huge multimeters ,i had to scrap them even in working conditions due to business interest and keep my clients updated , i too miss them very much as i have fond memmories established with them when repairing was regarded as most professional and satisfying jobs of that time , most of todays gadgets i have are latest due to technology upgraded