Anyways good to know how or taxes are benefiting some people. LOL.
Cal, back in late-summer 2005, I had a friend who worked on the civilian side of DRMO, the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office (Now called DLA). Anyway, he let me know there was a big office that was about to be refitted with computer equipment. Problem was, the old stuff worked fine. BUT, in order to get a budget for the next year, the department had to spend-out its budget.
So, the IT guys go in and set up all the computers in this office with brand new equipment on September 29. A bunch of that equipment included these huge CRTs which supposedly cost the Navy about $3000 each. Those stayed working in the office until COB October 1st when it was all packed up and replaced by the really new stuff. My buddy asked me how many monitors I wanted and I said "TWO". I paid $50 each for the monitors then drove up from Ventura, CA to Seattle to pick them up. I sold one of those to a friend of mine for $60 and used the other one until May, 2015. Fantastic piece of equipment.
Another friend called me from Keflavik, Iceland, when I was out in Guam in the summer of 2003. He knew I was a gearhead and he asked me to help him do inventory during BRAC. First thing he said was, "Phil, have you ever heard of a Line-hoff?" I said, "Linhof, you have one?"
"No, I have a bunch of them."
We went over most of the stuff in his inventory and it was a museum of photographic history, which included a lot of reconnaissance gear, since Keflavik was where all the intel imagery over the north Atlantic was processed.
By the time I got back to the states, DRMO had cleared it all out. You name it, it sold by the pound. If it were a camera that could be fit into an aircraft or handheld by a photographer who had a reason to be in Iceland, it was sold. I remember Nikon 6006 bodies with 105 micro lenses that had been drilled, tapped and screwed down to infinity, were being sold for $1 each. Those were favorites for us to issue to the RIOs in F-14s back on the boat.
Those days are over, unfortunately. I'm glad to have grown up in an analog world.
My mom recently retired and has been cleaning out the house after 30 years. She gave me all her old film gear which includes her 1969 Pentax Spotmatic with very yellow 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar. This is the camera that captured my birth, the first camera I touched and took a photograph with, the camera that made 40+ years of family photos. It has an erratic meter but it may go off to Eric for a full overhaul. I'm happy to be its new custodian and look forward to shooting it one of these days. Pure analog match needle goodness.
Phil Forrest
