Vintage computer equipment is not just for collectors

Yeah, theres lots of industries that use dated electronics...its pretty easy to get into that situation. My experience is from the sawmill game: You buy a piece of machinery that has the latest electronics come with it (and they usually have a PC-type human-machine interface)...the machine is worth a few million $ and it will run for 20 years. In a few years the electronics are becoming dated; in 10 years most every electronic device in there is obsolete.

But the mechanical part of the machine still has lots life left in it.

So the maintenance guys make a plea to management to update the electronics. They find that the updated electronics from the supplier are upwards of a million bucks. The payback isn't there. So management drags their feet. and the maintenance guys are buying old electronics offa eBay and retired guys from the original supplier.

Worse yet, is the scenario where the OEM supplier has sold out or gone bankrupt . We had this scenario, too. We ended up talking to a guy who used to work there and had some knowlege of the scanning equipment and a few parts...

Trying to find industrial computer parts was a pain, too. We had old VME bus computer equipment where the common cards were more-or-less still available but any off-beat cards where nigh on impossible to find.

Thats why there are lots of electronics outfits around that fix and resell old industrial electronics.

Some people may ask why not just upgrade, even go to an newer board in an older electronics package? The answer is the work required to get it working....programming, which is neigh on impossible when you don't have the people or the code to do it, and the rewiring that may be necessary.

All this tells me that there is a niche for some older electronics...but probably takes a while before buyer and seller can connect. If you have some oddball industrial equipment boards it might be worth checking with the guys who fix and sell the old industrial stuff. There's a chance that you would get more than scrap!

Jon.