A memory module from NASA auction

Hey Guys I bought a recent auction that had some NASA computer equip in it. I found this item that is pictured and was curious of what it went to and if it's worth more than scrap. One side says CPU MEM MOD 16 MB and the other side says 1989 E.S.G.C. It had a acquisition cost of $6421.10 which blew my mind.
Thanks.



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It's NASA. lol. You really suprised at 6k for memory, when DC spends money on things like toilet seats cover @500.00 a pop..

Never try to get in the mind of a politician or a purse string holder in DC, you'll never be right in the head again. Ha.

That's pretty cool tho, I'd be keeping that sucker if it was me. Just cause it's cool.

Sirscrapalot - Their all crooks!

Not scrap. It's from an Evans & Sutherland computer. I'll come back later and write more about it!

So what was this NASA computer equipment auction?!? How come I never hear about these things?

Anyway, what you have is a 16 MB, 25 MHz memory expansion card for the Evans & Sutherland ESV workstation. This was a high-end 3D graphics workstation first released in 1990. For its time, it was very powerful. It was also expensive: The "low-end" model in 1990 was priced at $49,000. But the computers it was designed to compete with, the Silicon Graphics Power Series, cost even more -- those were usually priced over $100,000. Both systems were based on the MIPS R3000 processor. I couldn't find a picture of the ESV workstation, but here's its closest competitor, the Silicon Graphics workstation:



The ESV systems were used by a lot of universities and researchers for scientific visualization (things like particle behavior and crystallography). Evans & Sutherland, which produced the ESV systems, was best known as a major developer of flight simulators for everything from aircraft carrier landing to space station docking. They were also famous for inventing the virtual reality glove, which could be used for simulating interactions with virtual environments. Remember, this was in the early 1990s, so it was mind-blowing back then. Today, you can do the same things (and much better) with any game console. If you want to see what some of their stuff looked like, take a look at this video:

Wow thanks for the help on that one. Thats some interesting stuff. Got a couple of other things from the auction. So what should I do with it. Ebay or some one on here would be interested.

Those ESV workstations are definitely not very common... If you have other stuff, why don't you send me a list with pics. It's probably not something I would buy, because I'm pretty sure I'll never find an ESV machine, but I can ask around for you. I can also help you figure out how to describe it in an eBay listing. It might not sell overnight, but there should be someone out there who would want it.