An old Tektronix oscilloscope sitting beside an e-waste bin. Not exactly what I expected to find on campus!

I’ve come across some interesting things at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), but over the past several months I’ve been photographing an assortment of old computing and scientific equipment that has been turning up in the university’s e-waste. We’re talking oscilloscopes, an Apollo workstation, enormous hard drives, and circuit boards from an era when computers cost about as much as a decent car.

What really caught my attention was the age of some of this equipment. A few pieces still carried labels from the New South Wales Institute of Technology (NSWIT), the institution that preceded UTS. There’s potentially decades of university history sitting amongst those bins, and I couldn’t help wondering where it all came from.

It Started With a Spectroradiometer

An ASD FieldSpec Pro spectroradiometer, found in UTS e-waste in November 2025. A rather expensive-looking piece of scientific equipment!

The first interesting piece turned up back in November 2025, when I found an Analytical Spectral Devices FieldSpec Pro spectroradiometer amongst the discarded equipment. I’ll admit that a spectroradiometer isn’t something I encounter every day, although I was curious enough to look into what it actually did.

The FieldSpec Pro was a specialised scientific instrument used to measure the spectral properties of light. Researchers could use one to study vegetation, minerals, soils, and other materials by examining how they reflected different wavelengths. Depending on the configuration, these instruments could measure wavelengths from the visible spectrum right through to the short-wave infrared, up to 2,500 nanometres.

The FieldSpec Pro was around by the early 2000s, and its original documentation mentions connecting it to a computer using an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP). Remember when parallel ports were useful for something other than printers? Apparently scientific instruments got in on the action too!

I have no idea what this particular unit was originally used for at UTS, or why it was eventually discarded. It was an interesting piece of equipment regardless, so I photographed it. Little did I know I’d come across another one several months later.

February’s E-Waste Discoveries

Me, an e-waste bin, and a sign asking people not to remove anything. This story was already getting interesting.

By February, I’d started noticing some considerably older equipment in the university’s e-waste area. It wasn’t just the usual discarded monitors and broken keyboards either. There were some rather substantial pieces of computing and laboratory equipment, including things I wouldn’t normally expect to see outside a museum or someone’s vintage computing collection.

The area already had signs asking people not to remove anything, and I wasn’t responsible for putting any of the equipment there in the first place. What interested me was its history, so I started documenting what I could with photographs before it potentially disappeared for good.

The Tektronix oscilloscope amongst the discarded equipment. The old NSWIT labels were particularly interesting.

One of the larger finds was a blue and grey Tektronix oscilloscope. It was a wonderfully chunky piece of equipment, complete with a CRT display, an assortment of knobs, and interchangeable modules. Not exactly something you could slip into your backpack, although I suppose portable test equipment meant something rather different sixty years ago.

The Tektronix Type 561A

The Tektronix Type 561A, looking rather more dignified on a table than it did beside the bins.

The instrument turned out to be a Tektronix Type 561A, a modular oscilloscope model dating back to 1962. Unlike modern digital oscilloscopes, it used a cathode-ray tube display and interchangeable vertical amplifier and time-base plug-ins. These allowed the instrument to be configured for different kinds of measurements without needing an entirely different oscilloscope.

What I found particularly interesting were the original NSWIT identification labels and an old calibration sticker dated January 1981. That provides a little glimpse into the instrument’s working life, although it doesn’t tell us when the university originally purchased it. NSWIT was established in 1965, so this particular oscilloscope could have been acquired years after the model first appeared.

Either way, it represents technology from the early 1960s, and it was apparently still being maintained nearly twenty years later. Seeing something like this amongst discarded electronics in 2026 is a little surreal, especially when you consider how much laboratory equipment would have cost when it was new.

An Apollo Computer From Another Era

An Apollo Domain workstation. Not something you expect to casually stumble across in 2026.

The oscilloscope wasn’t the only thing worth looking at. There was also a large beige computer that turned out to be an Apollo Domain Series 3500, a professional workstation manufactured by Apollo Computer Inc. If you’re not familiar with Apollo, they were one of the companies producing high-performance engineering and scientific workstations during the 1980s, before Hewlett-Packard acquired them in 1989.

These weren’t ordinary home computers. The Domain 3500 used a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 processor with a 68882 floating-point coprocessor, and Apollo’s July 1988 price list had disk-equipped configurations ranging from US$12,500 to US$28,900. That’s quite a lot of money to spend on a computer with less memory than a modern web browser tab would probably like!

The identification plate confirms it as a Domain Series 3500. Look at all those expansion connectors!

The rear identification plate confirmed the model, and the machine had an impressive assortment of expansion connectors. I rather like the construction of these older workstations. They were built for specialised applications, often with hardware and expansion systems quite different from the IBM-compatible PCs that eventually became the standard.

Inside the Apollo workstation. A rather satisfying collection of boards, ribbon cables, and metalwork.

Inside, there’s a substantial metal chassis, plenty of ribbon cables, a large power supply, and room for expansion cards. Everything looks wonderfully complicated compared with the compact boards found in modern computers, although I suppose that was rather the point. These machines were designed to be expanded and configured for some pretty demanding professional applications.

An Apollo With ISA Slots?

Four ISA expansion cards from the Apollo workstation. The Weitek chip is particularly interesting.

Amongst the Apollo’s hardware were several ISA expansion cards, which might seem a little strange considering that this was a Motorola-based workstation rather than an IBM-compatible PC. As it turns out, Apollo’s own documentation confirms that the Domain 3500 included a seven-slot IBM PC AT-compatible expansion bus. Who said you needed an Intel processor to have ISA slots?

More of the Apollo’s ISA hardware. There’s quite a bit to identify here!

Some of the cards have interesting markings of their own. One carries an Archive Corporation copyright from 1985, while another features a large Weitek chip. Archive was associated with storage products, particularly tape drives, while Weitek was known for floating-point acceleration hardware. I’d like to identify the exact boards eventually, as there are enough chips and part numbers here to keep me occupied for quite a while.

Hard Drives the Size of Bricks

The Apollo’s storage assembly, marked PA/380. That’s a lot of physical space for a few hundred megabytes!

The Apollo also had a substantial storage assembly marked PA/380. Original Apollo documentation describes the Domain 3500 as supporting 155 MB and 348 MB ESDI hard-disk configurations, while other surviving examples have been documented with Maxtor XT-4380E drives. That gives us a few clues about what might have been installed in this particular machine.

The XT-4380E was a 5.25-inch, full-height hard drive with approximately 338 MB of formatted capacity, an average seek time of 16 milliseconds, and a spindle speed of 3,600 RPM. Some specifications put its weight at around 3.2 kg, which is an impressive amount of metal to devote to a few hundred megabytes of storage.

One Drive, Two Sides, and a Lot of Chips

The top of an old hard drive, complete with a UTS asset barcode and factory defect map.

One of the drives I photographed had a UTS asset label, numbered 0057867AN, along with a printed defect map listing known problems with the disk surface. Back when hard drives needed this sort of information supplied with them, the low-level formatting process could use the defect list to avoid troublesome areas. Modern hard drives generally handle this internally, so it’s not something most people encounter anymore.

The defect map also contains references to head 14, which would be consistent with a drive having 15 data heads, like the Maxtor XT-4380E. That’s an interesting clue, although I still need to confirm the model from the actual manufacturer’s label.

Flip the drive over and there’s the Maxtor controller board. A rather impressive amount of electronics!

Flip the drive over and things get even more interesting. The underside has a densely populated controller board with Maxtor components, large integrated circuits, and enough supporting electronics to make a modern SSD look positively boring. Both photographs are of the same physical drive, so we can connect its UTS asset number and defect map directly to the Maxtor electronics.

The underside of the Maxtor drive. Quite a bit more going on here than your average modern SSD!

Another close-up of the Maxtor controller. Plenty of chips to investigate.

There’s something rather satisfying about older electronics like this. You can see individual chips, follow the traces around the board, and sometimes work out quite a bit about how something operates simply by looking closely. Modern electronics are impressive, but there’s not quite the same appeal to staring at a single black chip with everything hidden inside it.

More of the controller circuitry. Some of those part numbers might have interesting stories of their own.

One last look at the Maxtor hardware. There’s enough here to keep me occupied for hours.

This was the drive fitted to the Apollo and was labelled PA/380 on the front of the drive. Having photographs of both sides gives us quite a bit more information than we’d normally get from an unidentified drive sitting in a bin.

The Recycling Area and Its Signs

The recycling area where the equipment was being kept. Not quite the atmosphere of a computer museum.

The equipment itself was fascinating, but the location wasn’t exactly what you’d call a historical computing display. We’re talking industrial bins, concrete walls, exposed pipes, and all the usual things you’d expect to find in a university service area. I suppose it would be a rather unusual place to organise a guided tour of NSWIT computing history!

Universities must accumulate enormous amounts of equipment over the decades, and eventually things get upgraded, moved into storage, or disposed of. I’m certainly not suggesting that every old computer needs to be kept forever. Still, there ought to be a difference between an ordinary obsolete office PC and something with an interesting connection to the university’s own history.

Security and access notices around the recycling area. Personal contact details have been redacted.

There were also various security and access notices around the recycling area, including warnings that the equipment remained university property and wasn’t to be removed. I later corresponded with UTS Property about the signage, which raised a few more questions about how the equipment was being handled and where it eventually ended up.

What I’d really like to know is whether there is a process for recognising historically significant computing or scientific equipment before it’s disposed of. An old oscilloscope carrying NSWIT labels might not be useful in a modern laboratory, but that doesn’t mean it has no value as part of the university’s history.

Silicon Graphics, Control Data, and More Ancient Storage

More old storage hardware, photographed during another visit to the e-waste area.

A few days later, another collection of storage hardware caught my attention. There were several large black hard-drive assemblies amongst the discarded equipment, some of which still carried their original manufacturer and part-number labels. Fortunately, those labels turned out to be rather useful for identifying what I’d photographed.

Two of the old drives, carrying SGI and Control Data markings. Their part numbers turned out to reveal rather more than I expected.

One drive was marked SGI P/N 9410802, which appears in a surviving Silicon Graphics spare-parts catalogue as a 380 MB Seagate SCSI hard drive. Silicon Graphics made some wonderfully unusual professional computers, so naturally I’d be interested to know which machine this particular drive originally came from.

The other drive was labelled Control Data Company model 94171-344, with an additional part number of 77777127. This identifies it as a Control Data Wren IV, a 5.25-inch full-height SCSI hard drive from the late 1980s. Depending on its configuration, it offered around 330 MB of formatted storage, with a spindle speed of approximately 3,600 RPM and an average seek time of 17.5 milliseconds.

Better still, I managed to find the original Control Data specification from May 1988. It’s a whopping 207-page document covering everything from the drive’s mechanical construction to the SCSI command interface. There’s something rather exciting about being able to find the original engineering documentation for a nearly forty-year-old hard drive, even when the drive itself has ended up in e-waste.

Whether these drives originally belonged to systems used alongside the Apollo, or came from completely different departments, is anyone’s guess. The labels at least give us a starting point, and I’d be interested to know what other computing equipment the university had during that period.

And Then I Went to UNSW…

An ASD FieldSpec Pro on display behind glass at UNSW, July 2026. Look familiar?

At the beginning of July, I was visiting the University of New South Wales (UNSW) when I spotted something rather familiar behind a glass panel. Sitting there on display was an Analytical Spectral Devices FieldSpec Pro spectroradiometer. Yes, the exact same model of instrument I’d photographed in UTS e-waste back in November!

I found this particularly interesting because it provided a rather direct comparison between the two universities. At UTS, I’d encountered one amongst the discarded equipment, while UNSW had an example standing upright behind glass with its optical fibre cable attached. It certainly looked as though someone had decided the instrument was worth keeping around.

Now, I don’t know whether the UNSW instrument is part of a formal historical collection, a teaching display, or something else entirely. I also don’t know why the UTS example was discarded. But seeing the same model treated so differently did make me wonder how universities decide what equipment is worth preserving.

These weren’t cheap instruments, and they weren’t ordinary consumer electronics either. They were specialised tools that researchers used to investigate the world around them, and they tell us something about the technology available to scientists at the time. I think that’s worth remembering, even when the equipment itself is no longer particularly useful.

What Gets Saved?

Looking back over the photographs, it’s quite a collection. A Tektronix oscilloscope representing technology from the early 1960s, an Apollo workstation from the late 1980s, enormous Maxtor and Control Data hard drives, and a scientific instrument that turned out to have an identical counterpart on display at another university.

The NSWIT and UTS labels are what make some of these discoveries particularly interesting to me. They’re physical links to the institution’s past, and I can’t help wondering who originally worked with this equipment, what research or teaching it was used for, and how long it had been sitting around before someone decided it was time for a clean-out.

I’m not expecting universities to preserve every obsolete computer, nor do I think an old piece of equipment automatically deserves a museum exhibit. There are practical limits to what can be kept, but surely some of these things deserve a closer look before they’re sent off to be recycled.

At least I’ve managed to photograph a few of them, along with their model numbers, component markings, and old asset labels. Some of those details have already led me down interesting little research rabbit holes, and I suspect there’s more to discover if I keep digging.

If anyone remembers working with this equipment at NSWIT or UTS, or knows more about the machines and instruments in these photographs, I’d love to hear about it. There’s probably quite a bit of history behind those old labels, and it’d be nice to find out a little more before it’s all forgotten.

Who knows what else is sitting in an e-waste bin somewhere?

Sources

• UTS Antecedent Institutions
• University of Queensland Physics Museum: Tektronix Type 561A
• Apollo Computer: July 1988 Product Price List
• Maxtor XT-4380E Specifications
• Control Data Wren IV SCSI Product Specification, May 1988
• Analytical Spectral Devices FieldSpec Pro User’s Guide
• SGI Replacement Parts Catalogue