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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

One of my great joys as a teenager exploring electronics was the opportunity to clean out an old storage closet at some Fermilab facility with a friend. This was in the late 80s, we got several 1950s oscilloscopes and much other gear of similar era.

The room had been overlooked in the usual surplus process for years. My friend was related to someone working for the janitorial services company, and they'd been told to clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster.

We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.

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As a teenager I got to work and study at Fermi for two weeks under a DoE summer program. There was one kid from each US state and territory, and a few from other countries. We worked in the shops assembling the D0 and Leon Lederman tried to teach cosmology, which was both an incredible privilege and ultimately futile. I was eating in the cafeteria the day the Texas Supercollider was canceled and I don’t think there’s ever been a sadder crowd of physicists anywhere.

I wonder if they still do that summer program.

This is tangential at best but I was in Chicago,US once for a business trip and we had weekends off so we did some sight-seeing and one Sunday late afternoon we were close to Fermilab so we decided to take a look.

The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at the same time. We didn't see the accelerator of course but still, we saw some control rooms etc..., to this day I'm not sure if we broke in or what

I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door.

My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space.

https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/

(worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid 00s)

I recall back in the 90s that Fermilab had a public telnet page one could connect at to get current beam line stats/info.

back in the 1990s, they used to hold open house tours.

Fermilab was built from late 1967 and opened in 1969 so that must have been really old stuff.

Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).

I tried taking apart one of those old oscilloscopes. After the first screw, I heard a few nuts and parts drop behind it. I knew it was never going to be the same again. Complicated instruments.

One man's junk is another man's treasure.

I have a bunch of stuff in my house that I know there are people who would be happy to have it and maybe pay a few dollars but I live in a fairly small town and I'm certainly not about to go to the trouble of boxing things up and shipping them. I can get rid of some things by just leaving them at the end of the driveway with a free sign but doesn't work for everything.

ebay is your friend. People buy entire boxes of unknown old electronic equipment junk that may or may not be working. "As is." You don't even have to really list the contents, just a big picture of everything. I think a lot are scrapping the gold and components, something I got into for awhile. I got almost 4 oz of solid gold from crushed cpu's, memory, old IC's, cable connectors, etc., using nitric acid, a hammer and a jar. Also recovered silver. At current gold prices (about $1950/oz) those little bits add up. Old tantalum capacitors sell for quite a bit as well. They used to be huge and if recycled, many smaller modern surface mount caps could be made. There are several channels on youtube showing the process. It can be a fun hobby. Instead of taking my old gear to a recycling center, I throw it in acid (lol).

Do you really think it's likely the person you're responding to is holding onto these items he knows would be of use to someone, with the intention of it becoming monetized as scrap?

Any videos on how to recover gold from crushed CPUs, ICs, etc?

YouTube is your friend here. I think even NileRed has a video on it.

Edit: here you go: https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo

He does it with PCBs in one and ram connectors in another, but mentions the process is essentially the same for everything else including CPUs. I'm not sure what the economics of the acids he uses versus nitric are, though.

Please, if they're not already crushed, find a classic collector to give them to. Most things from the gilded age (heh) have significance as antiques.

There's nothing more disheartening to a classic computing enthusiast than to see a historically-interesting minicomputer destroyed by goldbugs.

So the adage goes but sometimes one man's junk just becomes another person's hoarding.

Yeah. I've gotten pretty good but still have some old electronics and computer-related stuff in my attic that I have no real reason to hold onto but have no interest in going to the trouble of finding someone to take it off my hands and probably basically hoard it.

What would be the fine difference between hoarding and collecting?

Whether or not your home smells like rotting garbage. There is a big difference between filling some shelves with obsolete gadgets, and having a big pile of rotting food covering every food preparation surface in your kitchen because you have a severe untreated mental illness. Let's not whitewash the reality of hoarding to shame some nerds for having obscure interests.

If you are a magnificent dragon, you have a hoard, if you are a puny human, you are just collecting.

Actually using or curating the stuff.

Well, one test if it is causing nevative impacts in other parts of your life.

What does one do with treasure but hoard it?

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