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From: mwtilden@watmath.waterloo.edu (M.W.Tilden, Hardware)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Silicon Valley Dumpster Crawl: The ideal Hacker Holiday?
Message-ID: <1990Aug27.174333.15870@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 27 Aug 90 17:43:33 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 38


As an undergrad I supplemented a good part of my electronics needs
by jumping around dumpsters outside various University technical buildings.
Found some really good stuff and it's not half as disgusting as you might
think (so long as you took care not to bust any of the closed glad bags).
Got terminals, modems, various optics, switchboxes, ect.  Helped out
quite a lot for a poor student.

I got to thinking though, just imagine what the dumpsters around silicon
valley contain and would they be accessible to, say, a group of guys 
on a 'crawl' from place to place with a small U-Haul.  Just think of
the components you'd find outside of SUN, IBM, NEC, DEC and (insert
three-letter techno-based anachronism here).  You could tile your bathroom
with dead SUN 3/50 boards (make a great back-scratcher), make a 
room lit entirely through the phosphor of dead 19inch video-tubes, 
take cpu/monitor casings and make the wildest robot Halloween costume,
install about 30 fake keyboards around your desk to *really* impress 
visitors, experiment with throwing wall current through the Vcc of
your most favorite CPU board (just like you've always wanted to) 
and get it on video for slow-mo playback again and again.

Wow.

The question is though, is such a crawl possible, or do such companies
have locks and guards and policies to prevent such things?  Has
anybody grown up in the area having done this as a kid?  Are there
really big 'junk sales' in the area or do people just wander through
the city dump with a hose?

Just curious.

Is all.

-- 
Mark Tilden: _-_-_-__--__--_      /(glitch!)  M.F.C.F Hardware Design Lab.
-_-___       |              \  /\/            U of Waterloo. Ont. Can, N2L-3G1
     |__-_-_-|               \/               (519) - 885 - 1211 ext.2454,
"MY OPINIONS, YOU HEAR!? MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!"