When collecting vintage supercomputers, a significant part of your spare time is spent with moving big and heavy parts. Colleagues from Cray-Cyber.org recently started cleaning out one of the storage spaces. To give you an impression on how this looks like, they did a time lapse video over ca. 3h, reduced down to ca. 10min: Cray-Cyber.org es wird im Lager alles zum Transport vorbereitet, Zeitraffer, no comment - YouTube
During my very active time at Cray-Cyber.org (ca. 2003-2012), I spent many hours in this storage location, unloading many truckloads of gear. There is no elevator to the first floor, only the stairs seen in the video. So, in the first floor, there are “only” boxes and smaller parts, which can be lifted and carried up the stairs by a single person. Things are stapled on paletts. The storage space expands behind the stairs towards the right.
At the stairs, you can see a Sun tape library and an (mostly) empty frame of a SGI Origin 2000. In the area behind the stairs, there are – among other things – several Control Data components (mostly peripherals) and several Cray J90 racks.
Cleaning the storage space is necessary, because the building will be teared down due to its age. It formerly served as a warehouse for farmers stuff like seeds, fertiliser and animal fodder.