Re: Not just in exotic places
I ran into a similar issue at a large tech company in early 1998 or so. One night some clever thieves who were almost certainly employees went through two floors of a building stealing every one of the then new 100Mhz frontside bus Pentium II chips and every stick of 100Mhz memory they could grab while leaving behind the older 66Mhz parts and all the cases drives and AFAIK graphics cards. For several years after that desktop PCs had a steal strap padlocked around the case.