"Super Computer part? Electronic Gold Scrap - Looks Expensive!"
It'd be interesting to see under the milled pressure chamber. RF amplifiers? Processor? Bare dies exposed directly to coolant?
Likely absolutely nothing, as it is clearly marked as a seal integrity test board. Only things there are the nice pressure sensor and the schraeder valve. It will have a solid top layer like the bottom of ENIG plate.
That "telecomms" board is actually a set of test/serdes characterization and development boards for the recently-defunct Tabula corp which aimed to bring out new FPGAs. Basically, by using time division multiplexing on the LUTs with a faster clock you could increase the capacity by an order of magnitude.
It's unlikely that they still work after being thrown around like that. I'd love to have a working one.
What a truly odd little corner of Ebay!
Particularly so as some of what they are selling is almost certainly worth far more if you DONT recover the gold!
I still think the prices are insane for scrap there, the gold plating is just never that thick.
Regards, Dan.
The PCB- and panel-mounted stuff might be nice. The hacked off, crimped cable connectors less so. Yeah, what a nifty little corner of eBay.
Particularly so as some of what they are selling is almost certainly worth far more if you DONT recover the gold!
Yeah, I almost cried when one guy I know told me what kind of test equipment he "recycled". He almost cried when I sent him a few ebay auctions and price estimates on how much similar gear was selling for these days. So I guess we're even.
What type of connectors are those?
The part number (21-01170-01) is from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which had factories near to the item's location, in Maynard and Marlborough, Mass. I have not seen that part before, and it doesn't appear to be indexed by G**gle anywhere.
My wild-ass-guess would be that it has something to do with the VAX 9000 (Aquarius), which was a VAX supercomputer with vector extensions. The mezzanine connector looks like a FCI Meg-Array 10022671. These chips are probably not usable by breaking bond wires due to rough handling.
Incidentally, your "divide by cucumber error" sig is relevant to DEC microcircuits. The engineers there published a joke paper about "organic light emitting materials" in which they stuck electrodes into a pickle. That inside joke became the code number for Alpha CPUs, which were numbered EVxx for "Electro Vlasic" (Vlasic is a brand of pickle). EV also could stand for "Extended VAX", but the joke explanation for the name was preferred.
My God! The prices there are insane! US$30 + shipping for a pound of RAM sticks? I can't imagine that you could profit off of that if you were able to magically lift the gold off and then sell it for spot. Never mind the dangerous chemicals and labor involved...