Collecters Item???

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#1 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 8:20 pm

I just bought a used docking station (actually, it's a port replicator. I always seem to confuse the two) for my ThinkPad 600E today at a local computer store for $5.00. When I got to the car to it, I noticed a big white barcode sticker on the top of it that says Enron Corp. then a serial number.

Could this docking station that's former property of everyones favorite corrupt energy monopoly be considered a collectors item?

christopher_wolf · #2 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 8:58 pm

Yup; I think it would; certainly more than just $5 IMO. If you put that on eBay, maybe somebody will take a big fancy to it.

The only question I have is what Enron was doing with a 600E Dock? I don't think they used 600s as the corporate laptop fleet; I am guessing that some exec ordered it through the company for his 600E.

dsvochak · #3 Post by **dsvochak** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:05 pm

I am guessing that some exec ordered it through the company for his 600E

I'm guessing that's a wrong guess. Given what went on at Enron I don't think anyone who qualified as an "exec" would have been using a 600E, either as part of the corp fleet or as his personal machine. What was the top of the line TP when they went belly up?

christopher_wolf · #4 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:11 pm

*shrugs*

That was the best I could come up with; I think the T42 was hot off the lines when Enron started having trouble. So that just leaves us with the question of "Why did they buy, and apparently keep track of, a Thinkpad 600 Dock?"

Thinking about it some, maybe the IT staff at a branch had a small, but powerful, utility laptop that happened to be the 600 (Great job for it

) and they picked up the dock from an IBM re-seller or even IBM itself. That is possible.

The only reason I thought of somebody ordering it through the company was because they had a 600 they would have liked to use as their primary laptop; so Enron footed the bill for a dock to go in an office.

#5 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:21 pm

Enron went belly-up in 2002, when the T30 was still the top notch system. However, Enron's scandal didn't hit major news and they dindn't declare bankruptcy until 2003, which is when the T40 was still the ThinkPad to have for the cost-no-object corporate and power users.

Given the 600 series official discontinuation wasn't until February of 2001 (for the 600X, 600E stopped in January, 2001 and the 600 stopped in 1999), there were probably still several 600 series laptops in service when Enron went belly-up. The average lifespan of a corporate laptop is about 5 years and if that trend goes for Enron, they could have still been using original 600s from 1998 in some areas when everything went to hell with the company.

christopher_wolf · #6 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:44 pm

Mmmm, that could explain it. It seems alot closer than 2003 though, has it been that long? I remember thinking about getting the T42 or T41 not long after that. Maybe I have a messed up scale of years then

Ah, well...

You could promote it as a piece of "American Corporate History"

#7 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:48 pm

Enron's faulty accounting hit the surface in late 2002, it just didn't get much media attention and go belly-up until sometime in 2003. As for the ThinkPads, the timeline is roughly:

600: 1998
600E: late 1998
600X: late 1999
T20: 2000
T21: 2000
T22: 2001
T23: 2001
T30: 2002
T40: 2003
T41: 2003
T42: 2004
T43: late 2004

#8 Post by **BillMorrow** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 1:43 am

i would think that there is a lot of stuff with similar label..

and for an interesting sidebar:
previous to being called ENRON, it was Indiana Oil Purchacing Co...
and I had several thousand shares in an inheritance from my great uncle..
which i sold and together with the proceeds from my eichler house on greer road in palo alto, paid for a house on dawnridge drive in los altos hills.. all this was in the 1980's..

imagine my surprise, a couple of years ago, when i learned that california has some $450 in dividends from enron and due to me..
which i tried to get but they just ignore me..

i think a dividend check from the ghost of enron would be a LOT more fun to have than that 600 dock..

DataAve · #9 Post by **DataAve** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 8:58 am

House in Palo Alto? Still have it? Oh boy, worth a small fortune today!

dsvochak · #10 Post by **dsvochak** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 3:10 pm

I stand corrected. Given the dates cited above, Enron was probably using 600's for something.

On the original question, a "collector's item" is something a "collector" is willing to buy. christopher_wolf is likely right that somewhere on ebay there's a bidder who would "take a big fancy to it".

#11 Post by **BillMorrow** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 2:14 am

DataAve wrote:House in Palo Alto? Still have it? Oh boy, worth a small fortune today!

the house in SF on miraloma drive is worth about $1.5M, the house on dawnridge in los altos hills is worth about $1.3M and the eichler at the south end of greer road in palo alto is anyones guess.. maybe $1M..?
hindsight is 20/20..
sadly, foresight is not so acute..

otherwise we ALL would have kept that funny looking car (a 1948 tucker) or that egg shaped thing great aunt sophie saved from russia in 1915 and all be multi-millionaires..

#12 Post by **schen** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 12:36 pm

As much as I love Eichler houses (unfortunately, none here in North Texas), and if you guys don't mind my redirecting back to the original topic, I do have a couple of thoughts on the whole "what models were current" issue. It really has more to do with corporate IT types. Hopefully, I'm not offending anyone here when I say that; in my experience, these guys are generally heavier on the Information side than the Technology. Around 99/00, I was working for the University of Illinois at Chicago and my wife for Earnst and Young (soon to be Cap-Gemini Ernst and Young) consulting and their standard issue at the time was the TP600e. But more oddly to me was that all these machines ran Windows 95b. This is while I was phasing out all my departments' 600s and 380s with replacing them with T20 on W2K, then later T21 on XPP.

As I got to know some of these corporate IT types around Chicago I learned that they weren't terribly interested in technology. Mostly their notebooks were used for Word, Communications, and some database access (Lotus Notes). They are largely interested in ease of maintainance (read; as few models and model changes as possible), no changes made so their software would continue to work with their custom software. They usually had a 2 or 3 year replacement cycle, but they try to buy the same models over and over again. I also got to be friendly with the rep at our main supplier (CDW) and confirmed my suspicions in this area.

I did learn something from them though. I learned to standardize to a large degree without sacrificing major advances in technology. As long as I was involved in IT management, I pretty much always bought Dell desktops and IBM laptops. I stayed with the same chassis such as T2x as long as possible before moving to a platform that would require me to change major components (eg. DDR, UltraBay Slim drives).

So, it is entirely possible that Enron had an entire fleet of TP 600s that had been their standard configuration for some time. Which is also one of the main reasons why ThinkPads have been a corporate standard for so long. They don't make random changes every year or so!

Website · #13 Post by **tfflivemb2** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 2:48 pm

Correct me if I am wrong, but not every machine that Enron used was purchased at the time of their collapse. Enron had been around since 1985. (See: this USAToday chronology article) They could have been using 701Cs for all we know.

#14 Post by **schen** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 3:30 pm

You are right on that front. And I don't know specifically what their equipment policies were, but most large corporations or other large entities work with some variation of the following scenario:

Determine a cycle (2 years, 3 years or 4 like us poor universities).
Determine whether you want to buy or lease (depends on which TCO papers you've read)
At the end of the cycle, the lease company comes and gets the machines due to be replaced and gives you new ones or if you buy, then you roll out new machines and some combination of storing and/or selling off of your old inventory. Typically, most folks don't keep machines around for more than a few months due to storage space issues. Which is why you regularly see batches of identical equipment come up for sale on ebay. These are from the surplus resalers that have gotten them from these large corporations.

So sure, they could have any number or type of machines around dating back to when they started, but it's not a strong probability. Large entities cut down the time and expense of support by standardizing. So usually, the only "oddballs" around are "one-off" units ordered by VERY high up officials or; more likely, stuff the gear-heads in IT have kept around because they just like it.

#15 Post by **JaneL** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 7:55 pm

schen wrote:As I got to know some of these corporate IT types around Chicago I learned that they weren't terribly interested in technology.

I used to be one of those corporate IT types at a couple of Fortune 500 companies (well, still am, just on the application side of the house now), and I assure you that I was extremely interested in technology. However, when you have critical legacy apps that have to be modified or rewritten completely in order to work with the latest and greatest version of Windows, Access, Oracle, etc, you ride an operating system, etc for as long as you can until that happens. Updates just don't happen overnight no matter how much you want to move on, and they can be very expensive. Every major change is weighed against its ultimate effect on the stock price.

#16 Post by **schen** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:14 am

Sorry if I offended, I've kinda gotten my posts all run together thinking that I had explained myself in relation to corporate IT situations. I had written a post on another thread discussing the reasons why corporate IT folks were generally slower reacting to changes in technology. I had cited the example of my wife's company at that time (Earnst and Young Consulting) and all the customized software they had to run and be absolutely certain of "fail-safe". My mistake on confusing myself in that area. Also, I definitely didn't intend to paint all corporate IT folks as not very technology oriented either. Therefore, I'd like to apologize on that front as well.

#17 Post by **JaneL** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:44 am

You didn't offend me. I merely pointed out some of us corporate IT types are really techies in disguise.

Collecters Item???

Collecters Item???

Enron "Dock"

Enron machines

Re: Enron "Dock"

"Enron Dock"

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