[ Sorry for the wide distribution, but if you want to help bring *BSD to the
PA-RISC, please respond to my work email (todd.whitesel@wrs.com) by thursday! ]

If you are in the silicon valley area and you would like to put together a
PA-RISC workstation for a few hundred bucks, read on, else delete.

TAME, Inc. (1245 Birchwood Drive, Sunnyvale, 408-734-3091) held a fire sale
on the 18th and left flyers on everyone's car in the parking lot at the
Foothill college swap meet. I was intrigued and went over to check them out.

I carted home a near-complete HP-9000/735 125mhz machine with a 6x2gig disk
array and a nice HP 19" monitor, for less than $600 (it was a package deal).

It took me over a week to find the right CD, but as of last night the machine
is happily running 10.20 with the CDE graphical login and all that.

Now that I know it works, I decided to get a second 99mhz box with lots
of extra memory modules (these are HP proprietary overengineered things),
so I just got off the phone with the guy who helped me on the 18th.

According to him, they are working overtime to close down the Sunnyvale
office by the end of the month. The HP boxes will be packed up late on
friday (the 24th!), so if anyone else wants to buy PA-RISC boxes, I need to
give him a list by midday friday -- earlier if possible. He doesn't have a
lot of time to answer query phone calls during the closedown, but is willing
to store some machines at his house for us to pick up after hours.

Alternatively I could buy a stack of bare systems and sell them to folks.
Whether or not I do this depends on the response I get.

The base deal is $150 for an HP 9000/735 99mhz machine (back panel has
2 serial, 1 parallel, AUI ethernet, HD50 SCSI, HD68 HP-style fast/wide/diff
SCSI) with 64 megs, and choice of internal disk cage (this is a removable
unit that holds two 3.5" SCSI drives, with power and ribbon cable running
from one back-panel connector to the drives and back out to a second back-
panel connector) to be used with either of the two back-panel SCSI ports.
Mouse and US keyboard are included.

A 125mhz version of the same base deal is $250.

They have at least 8meg, 16meg, and 32meg memory modules available, and
limited quantities of other useful expansion items: mono and color graphics
boards (I got the color one which is a "CRX" board with BNC output, 1280x1024)
and EISA riser cards (this is a board that goes next to the power supply and
provides one EISA slot complete with PC-style back panel plate). I'm not sure
about the pricing on these, but I think it will be on the order of $15 for
8megs and $50 for a graphics board.

They probably still have HP 19" monitors available for roughly $200-300
depending on whether you want fully refurbished or not. (N.B. these are
fixed frequency monitors that take three BNC's and sync on green, but
they are otherwise very nice monitors.)

Once again, please send replies to me at todd.whitesel@wrs.com instead of
calling TAME, at least for now -- they had a skeleton crew in the building
a week ago, and the two guys who know anything about these systems are
working full-time on the closedown.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com
todd.whitesel@wrs.com