the whole reason i rescued these NeXT machines from a garage an hour away was because of the asset tags still glued to them.
i know exactly where and when the machines came from: the university of alberta's General Services Building (GSB), 8th floor, computer lab, in 1995.
when i was a teenager, my mom would take me to the university and let me wander around campus with a pocket full of quarters for the arcade
her grad student office was on the 8th floor. across from it was the department computer lab, which consisted of three rows of boring beige 386 SX-20's and a massive line printer. i used to goof around playing Jezzball and Pipe Dream on those machines.
but tucked off in the corner were four jet black machines. they all had huge monochrome monitors, and a gorgeous GUI with Wile E. Coyote on the login prompt. there was a big sign that read "you must have permission from CNS to use these computers". i'd sneak over and try every login/pass i could dream of, and never figured out how to login.
ffwd to the 2000s:
i've hunted every week for the past 25 years to find those machines. i suspected they might turn up on some local ad eventually, and today they did.
they were bought by a gentleman (now in his 80s) from a provincial government surplus equipment auction sale 20+ years ago. they were decommissioned by the department, boxed up and auctioned as e-waste. he thought they'd be valuable, so he bought them all for a pittance. they sat in his garage for 25 years collecting dust, until his wife asked him to start clearing out his computing junk. (i'll post a pic of his garage soon)
so here they are - the department's most expensive asset at $10-20K CAD (after upgrades and accessories), ready to be put back to work again soon
#UofA #retroComputing #vintageApple #yeg