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1-2. Looked like they had gold on the circuits but is it significant enough to make a difference? The fingers on the breadboard were fairly large and the back reminded me of a wire wrap board so wasn't sure on that one.

3. These looked rather unimpressive, but some of the components are pretty old and didn't know if there might be any value added there.

(Please excuse my poor numbering skills)

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

I'll forward this topic to Chris.

Also interested in ID of these. I have a few including some that are in vintage airport transceivers, and other air traffic control equipment and some from a DJ's control panel. ( brain not awake yet, so don't remember what that item is called)

3 is all midgrade,

1 is probably low telco but I’m not positive

2 I’d say high peripheral if you snip the wire off that one board.
That’s water damage. It’s been rained on.

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42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Hi Lost!

So high peripheral on the damaged one???

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

I can’t tell from the image of the board is copper or gold, but either way those old through hole boards have little waste weight beyond what’s mounted.
I’ve sent similar cards as peripheral, which is now high peripheral.

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42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

The color is fairly accurate in the picture. If it helps, the gold on the fingers continued, without any color difference, onto the board. I wondered if it being an older hewitt packard board, that it was a fairly decent amount of gold.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

In the ‘70s, gold was far less expensive than it is today.

As such, Hewlett Packard, among many other companies of the day, slathered gold in much thicker layers on circuit boards, inside ICs etc, than they do today.

As you noticed and pointed out, the gold on the one board extends well beyond the gold fingers and is used on the traces, down into the thru holes.

To an individual who processes their own boards, CPUs etc, those type of boards may worth more to them than ones from the late ‘90s on up.

Old boards like yours from ATC towers, electronic test equipment etc will almost always have more precious metals on/in them. I even have old Hewlett Packard power supplies with nothing but gold traces throughout the entire board.

I even have old PCBDs that were so sloppily put together, there’s gold spatter around the edges of the mounting holes. And no, it had nothing to do with grounding.

Back in the day, HP had 55gal drums they threw board edges (trimmings) and rejects into with lots of gold on them. Those 55gal drums were secretly hauled off to a landfill. Never to be seen again. We indeed were wasteful back then.

Oh yeah, I met a guy who knew about Dell throwing away gold in their dumpsters. Dumpster diving at its finest.

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Here is what I see:

3 is Midgrade 2 is low tele and 1 is high tele.