If you know someone you can find some good deals. Fortunately, we here at Life Explained know lots of somebodies. We had several large defense department contracts during the late 90s and the early part of the last decade. Mostly dealing with the construction of parking structures in hostile environments, nobody wants their M1A2 Abrams, 68 ton, Main Battle Tank to sit out in the elements, and get all spotted and potentially rusty.
Or that is what we thought, and so did several members of key congressional committees, who received generous election donations from an unnamed donor. Turns out those things are remarkably sturdy, and a lot bigger, and heavier than cars, even the big SUVs. Man, was that general guy mad when that tank fell through the floor, and landed on his limousine. It would have been funny the way he was hopping around, screaming and swearing, and throwing his sunglasses and hat on the ground, if it weren't for all of those guys with all of those guns, knives, hand grenades, rocket launchers, and all sorts of explosive, violent stuff. It seemed like everybody there was holding a weapon. So, we left, we can take a hint.
Anyhoo, a guy we had worked with called us and said they were "decommissioning" a large number of large, dangerous, expensive nuclear weapons, all of which were controlled by computers, which were no longer needed. He said we could pick up some serious computational power for pennies on the dollar. We are always in the market for a deal, so we jumped on the opportunity.
They are not your standard PC, and there is a steep learning curve to the program architecture, and the hardware associations, but it came with a video, and a manual, so we should be OK. Here is a picture of the cover.
