James_Ball wrote:Consumer Products Guy wrote:benhutcherson wrote:
An older system like an HP 5890/5971 is .... a sentimental favorite of mine-I learned GC-MS on one, run my own business servicing a few, and also "resurrected" one at my day job not too long ago that's now is more or less daily service.
Not only did I learn GCMS from the HP tutorial, I also had to learn what a "mouse" was. I had pushed for GCMS in the 5970 era, but there was no funding. The 5971 ran on Windows 286 or 386, had MS-DOS Executive or similar before File Manager.
I learned on a 5970 that was connected to the HP-RTE-A mini computer, command line based Chemstation. The company had received its first 5971 with Windows 3.1 a week before I arrived. After six months they had it installed and when I went to night shift I spent most of my nights running through the tutorials learning the system since nobody else in the lab wanted to learn Windows
That was in the volatiles department, over in semivolatiles they had two old HP5995 instruments, basically a 5970 stood on end and married to the GC itself with a huge oil diffusion pump that backstreamed every time the power failed, which it did a lot back then.
So now you tell me why Brenda would probably throw something at me if I mentioned buying one of those and getting it going
I was reading some old ads not too long ago for a different HP model MS-it was somewhat older than the 5995, but described(as best as I understood it) the analyzer basically being inside the diffusion pump stack. They touted simplicity and ease of maintenance, but I thought it sounded like a lot of problems waiting to happen.
Speaking of really old instruments-when I started at my undergrad college we had a Finnigan 1015 stuck over in the basement of the library. It had never been operational there-it came from state Environmental Protection and was acquired at a surplus auction by our analytical professor(who I still talk to regularly, but has always been a bit of a packrat). I would have loved to get it running, but I don't think there was any chance-we did have the computer that went with it(or I should say the two 19" full height racks) but were missing a lot of the other bits and pieces that tied the two together. There were also some other prizes over there too-I remember a couple of 80s benchtop Finnigan ion traps and the Varian GCs to go with them, plus a few other Varian GCs with ECDs(dead) and NPDs.
We had a few nicer instruments in our building-namely a Finnigan TSQ-700 and a couple of Sciex Triple Quads(the latter had cryopumps-the only example of those I've seen). I kind of wanted to get the TSQ up and going, but the same professor steered me instead toward a PE-Sciex ICP MS-I never got anywhere with that, and still think the TSQ would have been a lot more interesting to me at least
. In any case, somewhere or another along the way, LSU's food science department wanted to set up an MS facility, and they hired an ex-Finnigan FSE to set it up. They bought the TSQ and the Sciex instruments from us, and while they were there to move them we offered him a "fire sale" price on the Finnigan ion traps(maybe $50 each or so-basically just a token amount). He got so excited over the 1015, and they had enough space in the truck, that we just gave it to him. I'd be curious to know if he ever got that one in particular going-apparently he knew of a way to run it on a modern computer. This was either late 2008 or early 2009 IIRC, or if not then within a year either way of there.
BTW, even though I've never used a TSQ, I have fond enough memories of that instrument that I'd dearly love to find one and get it going-of course my budget at work for nutty projects like that is basically non-existent(I might get a few hundred dollars if I could make a good argument for it adding capabilities we don't have, but that also comes with a few hundred extra dollars to have 220 service run to where it's set up) and I also don't have space for it.