The third expedition was the most successful, we managed to grab the NEC drives, mulloway, another Mac Plus, an ethernet transceiver, the manuals, the tape drive and boot tapes, and lots of other junk. Meanwhile whilst all the stuff was being moved Peter Cooper [COM] fell in love with CWR's cute little MicroVAX, and David Luyer started looking gleefully at CWR's StarServer with screwdriver in hand, we suggested to David that this might not be a good idea.
After that lot arrived, [COM] almost managed to get mulloway diskless booting and I tried valiantly to organise another effort at attempting to get the rest of it. During the time between our third expedition and the final expedition, we got another Mac II, this is currently working and being very happy in UCC.
The final expedition was definitely the most fun. We took off as many doors as we could off the Culler's racks and unscrewed everything that we could get off. We tried separating the two racks for about a quarter of an hour until we realised that we had missed one screw, OOPS! Fortunately the racks had wheels so we were able to push them back to UCC, seeing the two racks coming moving around the engineering building and due to their size obscuring the person pushing them was like a scene reminiscent of a Dr Who Dalek show. Pushing the racks past the Chemistry building could be describe as something like "Dance with Computers" as Simon Oxwell and Mikolaj J. Habryn having to constantly turn the computer round in circles to get over the uneven paving.
So we had finally managed to get the computers to the bottom of the stairwell, fortunately we were able to find enough willing (?) volunteers at the time to help get the racks up the stairs. The first rack was easy enough as virtually everything had been removed from it, the second was a bit more challenging as it still had the power supply and the vector processor card cage in it. With about eight people we were able to slide it up the stairs on its side with only minor (?) scratches to the paint work. The only reported injury getting the racks up the stairs was when we over-enthusiastic slid the rack up and managed to get a poor freshers foot.
Overall our purchase of the Culler and assorted bits, and the retrieval thereof has been the most successful thing that UCC has done this year. A big thank you to all that help in this and may your fish not explode.