Hi I have a friend that just collects nothing but old 8088, 286 and up machines. I asked him one day what he planned on doing with them and he said he was going to recycle the gold?? how much is in them?? enough to buy a cup of coffee...lol I thought that was kind of strange to go around and pick up these old machines to pull a few cards out. He also said the older the machine the more gold in it. He said he pulled a part an old cray mainframe and recovered like $400.00 worth of gold. Maybe I should start doing this for a hobby what do you think? Thanks Judy

OK ?

Did you ever have any fairly inexpenxive gold plated jewelry? The plating is so thin that you would not get much gold if you saved it all. And worse, how would you remove electroplated gold efficiently? To prevent corrosion on contacts some early ISA adapters were gold plated, but I do not see an encouraging path to riches there.

On a Main Frame the size of a house, I can see possabilites! But a 8088 or 8086 would have less than a few pieces of dust in it. IT would cost you more than that Cup of Coffee to get it out! LOL

Crays aren't mainframes, they're rather expensive supercomputers and thus use the amount of gold for its conductivity properties. If he can expend the energy and get the rest of the Cray together, it'll be worth much, much more than its paltry weight in gold! Also he might be intersted to know that a functioning 8088 chip can net him a couple of bucks if it hasn't been tampered with (re: someone tried to scrape off any part that glitters)

I myself would pay quite alot for a 80287 chip. alot more then you could ever get out of the gold, because the gold is worth very little to most. the working computers are worth much more to me. hell just the old hard to find software is worth way more then all the gold you can get from all the old computers in the world.