[vcf-midatlantic] Former NASA Amiga 2500

[Anthony Becker]

Speaking of NASA, I have a friend in Florida who has a drink maker made as
a retirement gift to an engineer on the Apollo. It uses Apollo parts (the
metal fittings and pipes) and has a computer on the bottom. labeled inivac
60

Don't know much about it besides it did work at some point in time. You
could dial in how strong you wanted the drink, and it has two cassette
players in the back wired in so it would play music while it created the
drink.





On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 9:51 AM, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

> A friend of mine sent me this eBay link...an Amiga 2500 formerly used by
>> NASA as a telemetry lab workhorse. Interesting! The $5,000 pricetag seems
>> ridiculous to me, but who knows...maybe someone out there will find it
>> reasonable.
>>
>
> Waited to reply to this, but I used to work at NASA Langley (as well as
> their auctions :-) and a good friend of mine did a lot of NASA surplus
> auctions.
>
> At one point in time he got a bunch of Atari 8bit stuff that once was used
> in a flight sim I belive to drive displays.
>
> He got a bunch of Atari ST equipment from a NASA auction that was used for
> unknown reasons. I have the TT030 and Mega 2 on long term loan :-) Neither
> fully worked but I have them running now.
>
> I did see BeBox cardboard boxes with other stuff in it at auctions, so
> there were BeBox systems on center somewhere.
>
> In the place I worked, I was mostly an IRIX and Solaris admin. Our
> hardware included SGI Origin 3800 96proc 64GB 7TB, Origin 2000s, SGI
> Challenge XLs, Ls, Sun E3K, Sun E4500, Sun E6800, various storage systems.
> Early days there was also HP UX on a few hosts and towards the end when I
> was there a single IBM RS/6000 box that was kind of a waste.
>
> I have pictures from some of the auctions even. My first auction there was
> a Convex C220 or something.
>
> In those days I was mostly after ion and yag (532nm) laser systems, SGI
> and Sun hardware. Was starry eyed for Cray hardware.
>
> I ended up with some Macintosh stuff from the auctions as well.
>
> Good times. Then the internet ruined my goldmine. Damn you online auctions
> and the rich bidders you brought.
>
>                         - Ethan
>