I just opened a box from a warehouse in California. A few months ago I had the main CPU for my System 5 mixer go bad. I was lucky to find a spare one from a defunct company called Todd-AO, which was once the biggest studio facility in the world.
I opened the box, and couldn’t believe how clean this was. My first guess was that it was a spare, that they had bought off Avid, had stashed on a closet, and were hanging onto incase another failed. I couldn’t find spec of dust on it anywhere. But it was certainly used. When I booted it up, I final mixes from tons of A lister movies lol. The government auctioneer didn’t even bother wiping the hard drive before auctioning off all the company assets.
I called a former contractor who as familiar with the facility who said they had paid upwards of $1500/ square foot for clean room and an addition couple million for a massive air filtration system.
Man…can you imagine paying that much for a vault to dump a ton of mixer brains in? Wow.
To think this computer was over 12 years old, cost ~$80,000 new and mixed hundreds of feature films every day, and to be that clean…crazy!!
